If I open source a product and would like to sell it through SparkFun (and they would like to sell it too), would they make it themselves and sell it (meaning I’m cut out), or resell products I supply them with as a courtesy.
I see Arduino as an example of the latter, and OpenServo as a potential example of the former…but to clarify I’m not clear that the OpenServo creators don’t get something when SparkFun sells the products.
Could you clarify?
thank you.
Juat my two cents.
You have to ask yourself: what I want to do with my product: make money or “give it to the community” ???
If you want to make money, don’t make it open source, as it will be very fast copied and sold by chinese. 
But as a side effect, you should provide support, repair, etc…
But if you want to go open source, you should expect poor return on investment. :mrgreen:
Angelo
Also adding my two cents, this is completely untrue. Getting into that paranoid mindset that the Chinese are going to copy your widget is a bad bad place to be. The fact is they will copy it whether it's open source or closed source, that does not matter.Polux rsv:
Juat my two cents.You have to ask yourself: what I want to do with my product: make money or “give it to the community” ???
If you want to make money, don’t make it open source, as it will be very fast copied and sold by chinese.
But if you want to go open source, you should expect poor return on investment. :mrgreen:
Angelo
Look at Arduino, Adafruit, Sparkfun, Seeed, DangerousPrototypes etc. These people are all selling open hardware and making huge returns on their investment. This is because they provide value that cannot be easily downloaded as source code or files. They offer friendly customer support and tutorials, which adds value to their open hardware products. If someone wants to copy and compete against them, they need to match that same level of service, which costs money in the long run.
To address the OPs question. From what I know about the usual arrangements, either sparkfun acts as a retailer selling the products you provided them, or they build and sell the hardware, such as the OpenServo and donate a portion of sales revenue back to the creators. This may not be the case with everything, as I’m sure specific deals are negotiated for different products.