> to repair shops under a confidentiality agreement
To be honest (and as a Framework laptop owner) that's a bit disappointing, the 'to repair shops' part and I assume some sort of bar to meet for that, I suppose I understand though. The link you post says pinouts are available, which following through to Github seems to mean just for connectors. I wonder if you could share the BoM and locations perhaps, so not a full schematic, but enough for someone to replace a faulty component like for like or with an equivalent part?
Seems to me that would protect what (I presume) you want to protect, while still giving owner-tinkerer-repairers basically everything they want?
They're a company truly trying to strike a balance between defending the IP they create and what's best for their community. There's no real winning move here that doesn't open them up to Chinese framework clones on Alibaba in a month
There's no real winning move here that doesn't open them up to Chinese framework clones on Alibaba in a month
Arguably if the Chinese wanted to, they could've already beaten Framework to the market. All the major OEMs/ODMs are in China (or Taiwan, but let's not get political here...) and I'm almost willing to bet Framework just contracted this work out to one of them. Also, those OEMs/ODMs are very much capable of taking the Intel reference design schematics and fitting them into the requested shape. That's basically how things like the Thinkpad X62 happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274644
Are BOM & part locations really the key missing pieces that are going to enable that/make it significantly more likely?
Some could already do it, and don't need those; the rest would still be missing schematics, layouts, mechanical drawings, etc. just like a user that wants to know what the unmarked/ambiguously marked chip is in order to try to replace it.
To be honest (and as a Framework laptop owner) that's a bit disappointing, the 'to repair shops' part and I assume some sort of bar to meet for that, I suppose I understand though. The link you post says pinouts are available, which following through to Github seems to mean just for connectors. I wonder if you could share the BoM and locations perhaps, so not a full schematic, but enough for someone to replace a faulty component like for like or with an equivalent part?
Seems to me that would protect what (I presume) you want to protect, while still giving owner-tinkerer-repairers basically everything they want?