Gumalca

I think the images you chose are a bit unfair. The 42108 image has the boom much more elevated than the others. When the boom is down on the 42108 the actuator sits exactly parallel. The A shape increases on the other models when the boom gets elevated too.

Are you sure it flopped? All this talk about crowd funding, test run and the like are just marketing strategy. Lego does not need crowd funding to launch a product. Lego is very good at estimating the market value of their products on their own. They just felt they could make some extra cash with a limited product run and a lot of hype around it. And then later when asked again about their plans they just said, nah, wasn't a big success.

True. On Reddit (where posting box pics of the sets you just bought is very common) many people post this set and claim it's one of their first technic sets. And every time I think, meh, there's better technic sets out there.

That's not nice. I hope this doesn't deter you from making instructions or creating new models. Keep up the good work!

Rain568 has pulled down the ldd file (I still have it saved) and has made PDF instructions which he is selling instead. Really wondering if he has discussed this with the designer or if he's just making money from other people's work.

I wouldn't call that "sharing" if someone sells instructions for money. They do share the photos of their products, just like Apple "shares" photos of their iPhones, but Apple never shared any of their devices with me unless I pay them. Also the community doesn't care, there will always be people sharing photos, instructions and digital files for free. The community will live on. If there are no people sharing anything for free to start with, I wouldn't call that a community, that's a market. I've published instructions for free myself, and I wouldn't care if I see someone selling them. That's completely in the spirit of open source communities. Even with open source licenses that many companies find quite restrictive like the GPL you are still allowed to sell anything that comes with a GPL license. I could start a business selling Firefox, that would be completely fine. I would just need to find somebody dumb enough to pay for something they can get for free elsewhere... Now some people say they have expenses and spend effort creating instructions and they want compensation for that. That's okay. Start a crowdfunding campaign and once your expenses are compensated release the instructions for free to the community. Anything else you do is speculating on profit for you. I don't have anything against that either, but I don't see how that benefits the community. I wouldn't buy anything like that. Don't treat your customers like criminals.