Is it a special screw driver or special threads…

Right into what prompted this thought… A Milwaukee crescent wrench.

Now I write it, that tool is a “crescent” wrench, a crescent wrench is not a French pastry wrench, as I often read it. It was made by a company called Crescent, I believe, or a guy,

At some time the “Crescent Wrench” was a novel concept, I am going off vague, late night internet memories, but I believe before the crescent wrench all we had was wrenches and sockets.

Milwaukee sells a “proprietary crescent wrench”

Ignore the fact that Mr. Crescent created a proprietary wrench design, Milwaukee has further made a “proprietary screw mechanism” for the crescent wrench.

When I saw that dirty word on the pack. “proprietary” I almost got a chill. But then it made me think, about the title of this post.

Valuable propriety vs propriety to create value

Milwaukee has used the first. They have created an “improved” locking design, fantastic. Even if it does not work, at least they used the good propriety.

A bad example would be electronics manufactures gluing over the UART pins on their board so a user cannot repurpose the device. IDK. I am sure you can come up with examples. People guarding things for no other reason than to make money. But they need to eat, remember that, its just some industrys get so icky gross haha.

This is all

Assemblies and withheld information

When you buy something, your “simple rat brain” (what I call mine often). You would expect the product comes with certain things.

Something you can almost always be sure it will NOT come with, is all of the INFORMATION related to it.

Like a car, you buy a car, but you do not get the technician computer tooling. You do not get full diagrams.

With software, you do not get source code but compiled versions.

In machines, the service can be “handled be the vendor”. As in, any time we need information about a machine, the “proper” way to get information about it is to literally have someone from the company physically come over for an adult play date!

License keys as “forced propriety”

Really if you think about it, they are the sort of “pinicel of propriety”. We are flat out saying that none of this is going to work without some tidbit from the mother-ship. We can decide how to handle lost contact with the ship, but at the end of the day the result is the same…

I don’t even have a problem with it, I am just getting my thoughts out.

Propriety to guard from misuse

Microtech Knifes and my GR corolla have something in common… They use “special screws” in the places I really should think twice about before loosening…

My transfer case has a “do not touch” bolt right near the fill bolt. So what did they do? The “do not touch” one is a different head than the fill. So I really would need to like miss-tool to mess this up. Within the scope of a fluid change, that other one would seem “proprietary” in nature wouldn’t it.

On the knifes, they used to use these screws that prevented disassembly unless you had tracked down one of their tools. But they left the pocket clip screws as standard, so the user could switch its side with standard tools.

There are many devices that use physical characteristics to steer the user or technician a certain way… Sometimes that way is to the service center…

Healthy propriety

Adds value to the product or service. It makes it better in some way or ties too. Maybe it just gives the maker a way to keep making it!

Unhealthy propriety

Restricts value to the user. Seeks to conceal and minimize available usefulness for seemingly arbitrary reasons or control over a market.

The bottom line

What information is shared about something, and what is withheld, to me, shows a lot about the intent of the creator. Simply, if I can tell they worked to make it their best version, I respect it. If they worked to make it a tool to extract as much money from me as possible, I do not respect it.

I’M LOOKING AT YOU APPLE

Image by: By WelshPixie – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72756721