[DangerousThing]

Originally Posted by Flaco76

Safe tech and older items (10+yrs or more) can be printed at anytime. However, they are well, plain and basic. This is your household goods, most furniture/electronics and items you would find in a dorm room or person's first apartment. If you want the latest items ranging from weapons to fashions you need to steal it. Some companies may pay you to steal the latest designs from a competitors. Then the infosocialists want to look for the upgrades to the infrastructure. Plus on the frontier the latest music, videos and slinklys can be used to gain support from the locals.

There will probably be a lot of legal open source hardware to begin with from various programmers who do that sort of thing, just like in the real world.

One thing I know is that anything that is on a computer can be stolen. One just needs an unlocked version of the fabricator, probably available a few weeks after the locked version.

I can't picture ships being useful in intercepting tight beam communication. At best they can be used to move stolen info from system to system. Or to steal new items so they can be reverse engineered.

Also I could picture open source hardware being a big selling point so that if the company goes bankrupt you can still build repair parts. I really think that DRM will be the plaything of totalitarian regimes. Most people seem quite willing to pay a reasonable price for what they want.

With open source hardware I could picture research costs being lower because most complex devices could be made of low-level components that are freely available. Open source object oriented hardware!