John Fluevog Shoes has visited our little discussion board about their Open Source Shoe Design contest, and have come up with an eminently rational and reasoned response, including rewriting the fineprint on their submission form and adding a page of links to Open Source initiatives. I love cluefulness in action!

Thursday morning, having gone over your comments, we had a lengthy discussion and reviewed the basics of our just – launched “Open Source Footwear” programme. In its development, a key concern was the issue of design ownership. This might seem, on first glance, to be the popular scenario of Corporate Behemoth Extorting Treasure From Defenseless Innocents. In fact, we had to address ownership to avoid situations where we might be liable for designs we considered to be in the public domain. The main idea we’ve presented is that the customer designs the shoe but we’ve made it clear there are also other courses of development. What actually happens after the initial sketch can result in something that might be nearly spot on or might look nothing at all like the original. For instance:

1/ Two people submit similar sketches, but one’s better. We make that one, but the other person thinks it’s their design. Whose is it?

2/ We combine different parts of several sketches, maybe adding our own ideas – who designed the shoe?

3/ We produce a shoe on the understanding that the design is safely in the public domain. The customer isn’t quite as clear on this, however, and when the shoe appears in our stores, the lawyer appears at our door. Oh boy. Court. Multiply this one by the number of people who might be a little vague and everything disappears into a black hole.

These are only some examples of the potential rat’s nest we faced. It goes on and on. The only effective measure is to make everything airtight from the beginning. But now, it appears the definition of “airtight” may be more flexible than we’d originally thought.

Once we began getting your emails and reading your discussion board, we asked ourselves, in light of it all, what would really be the worst case scenario, if we were to simply shift gears right now and be completely open with all designs. It immediately became a forehead smacker for us – all we’d have to do is be equally clear that any submitted design was public domain. This is, of course, also more correctly in line with true Open Source philosophy.

This email by no means addresses all of your points and we do have further thoughts on those, which we may post later. However, we wanted to respond quickly, both with this email and, more importantly, with actual changes to our promotion. We look forward to your comments. Thanks again for helping us simplify things.

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