I posted this same reply on reddit (where the original text was removed), and thought it would be good to put it here too.
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This is a bit frustrating to read, as it doesn't really sum up the conversation I had with /u/gondolindrim_ last night, in which I only gave honest thoughts on these things at Gondo's request - I've been nothing but supportive of the project in public and private.
> In Brazil there are no 40% keyboards available, and he wanted to try the layout. Unfortunately, due to abusive taxes of the government, a Planck was out of the question, so he set himself up to make his own design of the ortho 40% layout to be distributed in Brazil
Gondo came to me last year and described this issue, and I agreed that this was a pretty cool solution to the problem. I expressed that making the PCB compatible with Planck parts would be a neat objective, since I have a lot of my designs on the repo as open source, and people could 3D print them and modify them to their liking.
> The concern from this QMK team member was that we were going to copy the Planck firmware and just flash it onto the Shark
The firmware itself is absolutely not an issue here - the issue they described (I think) was that it would be a drop-in replacement for the Planck PCB.
> In Jack’s words, open-source can hurt the community and OLKB
Open source is what makes QMK, OLKB, and many other amazing projects possible, and something I'm committed to at my core - to try to distort my words in this way is disingenuous. While it's true that open source hardware has some unfortunate consequences with Chinese copies (the Pro Micro being the most prominent example of this), all of my CAD work is open source with a pretty permissive license, and I have the Planck THK which is under GPL 3, and has led to the awesome Plaid (
https://github.com/hsgw/plaid) project.
> The biggest issue from Jack was that the Shark mounting holes conformed to Planck cases and plates
This is wholly inaccurate. I gave my full blessing (whatever that's worth) for the project to be compatible with Planck parts.
> Though we do not view the Shark as a copy, OLKB can label it as such and the word will spread like wildfire
I have not and will not do this to this to any community project, and am hesitant to even do this to the ortho 40% keyboards that were made outside of the community (the one I'm immediately involved with at least). Even with projects that may have direct competition to the Planck, I've tried to welcome them into the mech keys and QMK community, and help in any way possible.