So you want to make money on Donkey™ Car?
That is awesome, but there are a few things you should know first.
Donkey car is a project that Will Roscoe and Adam Conway started in 2017, and from the moment we open sourced, we knew that we were not building a project but a community. Over the years, the community has become large and many people have contributed and supported the community. To this day, the community is the most important thing and the thing and we will strive to protect the most. If you want to sell Donkey(TM) cars in such a way that supports the community, great. If you don't, well don't be surprised if people in the community are upset, and possibly hostile and you get banned from the Slack and the Github repo. How do you know if you are supporting the community? well I have put this guide together to help you through this. I have split this explanation into three sections 1) Legal 2) Standards 3) Dos and Don'ts
Legal
All of Donkey car is released under various licenses. Some allow you to copy the code and use it, some are non-commercial and all of it requires attribution. Please look for the licenses in the hardware and software before using it. If you just download our software, rename it and start distributing it without explicitly acknowledging Donkey, you are pirating the good work of the community. If you don't know how open source licenses work, it is probably a good idea to get some legal guidance (we do not offer legal guidance)
The other thing to understand is that Donkey is a trademark, so you may not sell anything called a "Donkey" without talking to us first. This is a tricky needle to thread, but we are pretty nice about this sort of thing, so just reach out to us on slack.
Standards
We have some very specific non-negotiable standards:
- All designs must be open source - be it hardware or software if you want to participate in the Donkey Car community. Also it must be open source from the start - promises to open source later are frowned upon.
- All components must be available globally (or as close to globally as possible). This means you must use metric screws and not promote products that are only available in, say, the US.
Do's and Don'ts
- Do share your project up to two times in the community, but don't advertise in the community. If it is a project that is for sale, only share in the #general channel or #random channel.
- Don't submit a PR to the Github repo with your product or store, please contact us if you want to do that
- Do support the customers of your product in the community, that is encouraged, but don't answer generic questions with "Buy my thing".
Hopefully this is a start to clarifying our expectations of people starting a business around Donkey. Good luck to you and feel free to reach out to Will (@wroscoe) and/or Adam (@acbot) on Slack.