Distributed Market Substitution

A condition whereby full opensourcing of a product and its enterprise infrastructure results in substitution of proprietary production with smaller scale, distributed, flexible fabrication - providing livelihods to thousands of producers and fewer middlemen, distributors, or marketers - and bringing production back to communities. This can happen for most of light manufacturing, a significant fraction of the primary sector + heavy industry. OSE is working on demonstrating this feasibility. Light manufacturing can happen in family businesses, and in open source microfactories in communities.

The idea is that as barriers to entry are lowered, and product design is designed-for-flexible-fabrication in open source microfactories - then a 1000x or more wider production of the specific good can occur. The logic behind this is that the most robust production is local production, as it creates unjobs in a decentralized + distributed scenario. The incentive behind this is enterprise startup in communities. This can happen as open design becomes available - as open source microfactory technology becomes available - and barriers to entry are lowered - such that the value chain shifts to efficiency (no competitive waste, no transportation, local and recycled materials). It is theorized here that worldwide transportation logistics cannot compete with local production due to transportation/logistics costs.