Our Reasons for and Paths to Commercialization

The primary focus at the FarmBot Project is to build a community around using and developing FarmBot technology much like how the RepRap Project has done. This means community sustainability must be reached whereby the technology grows, the community thrives, and the work is accessible to non-developers and/or non-technical people. This is all very possible and can happen in an expedited fashion when there exists the opportunity for compensation (financial gain) and people capitalize on that opportunity. Such commercialization may take the form of:

• Providing FarmBot software as a paid service
• Selling premium software plugins
• Selling hardware plans, kits and/or accessories
• Selling value-added data

Therefore my reason for commercialization is to ensure that community sustainability is achieved and to get there faster than it might happen otherwise. The path to commercialization is dictated by what the community needs, which at this time I suspect will be all of the different components required to own and operate a Farmbot:

• Easily assembled, hackable, and fully documented complete hardware kits
• Maintained software as a service suited to non-technical users
• Access to and the ability to share plant growing data (OpenFarm)

We will need to provide these three components at least until there are other companies or people providing those value to the community as well, otherwise we run the risk of losing community sustainability.