Most electrical/electronic items (radios, TVs, washing machines, ...) used to come with a schematic, or at least a block diagram, inside the device. Similarly, published integrated circuit data sheets contained enough information to understand how the chip worked to a low-level. This changed around the 80s from memory? There wasn't a word for "open source" in electronics, as it was just the unnamed default. It was all paper based, as it predated wide-spread online distribution.

I've been thinking a good way to understand the 'sociology' of information sharing is the structure of capital or prestige in an ecosystem

For example, it's not an accident that software development is a very 'open' industry. You can learn anything about making a NextJS shopping cart online. Because nobody is really getting value by holding this knowledge as secret 'alpha'

On the flipside for example, academics, scientists and journalists often have very different incentives. Getting the credit for being the first to talk about an issue is what matters for their career so they are likely to be guarded about what they're working on or what their methods are

And this is why Zuck open sources LLMs; he is not really selling tokens in some infra service so keeping the output generation scarce doesn't really matter to Meta

(Joel Spolsky had an adjacent idea saying "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements" like Billboard publishes a lot of music journalism for free but monetizes their chats/data)

Anyway, so this explains what's going on with this electronics retailer--while it is still a perspective and effort that is uncommon--publishing the schematic is not competitive with the shop unless you start manufacturing and open up another shop

In the mid to late 90s I was selling a rocketry flight computer kit:

http://www.taniwha.com/~paul/fc/index.html

We didn't have words to describe "Opensource" yet, I wrote (from the above page):

  This page is designed to be a home for the Taniwha Flight Computer which 
  I'm building and kitting for a number of other interested people. This is 
  NOT a for-profit enterprise - the idea is to get a critical mass of people 
  up and using the same hardware so that they can write cool and interesting 
  code (or make cool and interesting hardware) and share it with everyone else 
  who's using the design.

  A quick note about copyrights etc - all the stuff here is marked with my 
  copyright - this is something I do with everything I design to retain control 
  of my designs should I decide to sell them for profit in the future. However 
  everything in these pages, the design itself and the software that runs on it 
  (at least the stuff I provide) is hereby provided it for anyone's use - but I 
  retain ownership and copyright (even feel free to build them commercially if 
  you want).

  "Open Source" is now all the rage - we've been running this project that way
  for the past 4 years - so as always "feel free to steal anything on these web
  pages".

Apropos open electronics, one of my most treasured toys is a Denshi Blocks electronics experiments kit, with a synthesizer chip in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denshi_block

There are professional versions of the Denshi block, used in engineering schools in Japan in the 80's/90's (as I recall), to lay out circuits and serve as a test-bed for student lab work:

https://www.denshiblock.co.jp/whatdbk.html

(See also: https://www.denshiblock.co.jp/seihinindex.html ..)

In my case, it's just a great reminder of the 70's, and how bright and shiny the future used to seem. Its also a pretty fun little woo-hoo-bonky-boing synth toy, now and then ..

I would have to wonder if there aren't pro blocks in that store somewhere, probably in their own neatly labeled section ..

Published schematics go back to the earliest days of radio. Electronics magazines and the Radio Amateur's Handbook are roughly a century old.

Before that, there was science. Although the rules were loosely defined, scientists were expected to provide enough detail in their papers for someone else to replicate their work. That's where I learned about open design, before I learned to program.

Into the modern age, when "code" became part of electronics projects, the magazines printed source code listings, and later required authors to provide their code for an online repository. I published a couple of those articles back in the day.

This site, https://fabscene.com/ fascinates me even more

20 years ago my town had a boutique electronics store, somewhat like a Radio Shack, except they'd developed corporate sales as a revenue stream instead of pushing cellphone contracts on consumers. It carried on until the owner died last year.

I enjoy seeing boutique businesses but it's nice to see one where the core operation (not just the IP) has a shot at outlasting the founder.

> 100% profit margin [..]

That’s not how these things work

but there was not a single schematic in article, just pcb view without even traces