> if the product were a power wheelchair, > which has both hardware and software, comes in > a variety of sizes, and has a cushion by a different > vendor which may not be open, how would things work > with what you propose?
Think of the extreme limitations of the GNU project when it first began. All the tools and supporting infrastructure (editors, compilers, text-wrangling, etc.) had to be built from the ground up. We will not immediately have Free as in Freedom factories, and can assume current manufacturers will not help, so creating a wheelchair may take quite a long time at first. Also, according to the patterns in the GNU GPL, we may not want to mix a proprietary cushion with a Free wheelchair, but I am not so sure this is absolutely necessary, as long as we apply the "Terms of Operation" to creating future instances of such Objects... On the other hand, considering the popularity of so-called "fab labs", there is a chance we could design and implement a GNU kind of wheelchair within a fairly short time using off-the-shelf parts. So if you were to buy such a Free as in Freedom wheelchair, if any of the Price you paid was more than the real Costs of construction (where wages are a part of Costs), then you would receive some shares of ownership in the growth of that fab-lab, and in doing so, would have access to the Material Means of Production, thereby allowing you, or anyone you choose, to repair or modify your wheelchair, or to build another one.