Story is very simple:
- 2016 - edy555 (aka ttrftech, Takahashi Tomohiro) designs the NanoVNA from scratch, with his own schematic, PCB layout, and firmware. The schematic and firmware are public and GPL licensed. The PCB layout is unreleased. edy555 sold NanoVNA kits for a short while.
- 2019 - hugen uses edy555's schematic, makes small changes (adding a battery and enclosure), designs a PCB from it, and begins selling it. The hardware is virtually unchanged and edy555's firmware runs unmodified on it. He did not release PCB layouts. At this point I'd say edy555 still deserves at least 90% of the credit for the NanoVNA hardware design and firmware, and hugen deserves some credit for the layout design.
- 2019 - flyoob (deepelec, former employee of sysjoint) designs the NanoVNA-F, also based on edy555's schematic, and without releasing PCB layouts. It runs a modified version of edy555's firmware that has been ported to FreeRTOS.
- late 2019 - HCXQS and OwOComm forms a team of engineers that would design the NanoVNA V2 from scratch. The hardware is entirely a new design and has nothing to do with the original edy555 NanoVNA. The firmware is also half from scratch, with only the UI and menu system copied from edy555's NanoVNA firmware. The hardware design files are all released and we are also fully GPL compliant on the firmware side.
So far so good, but in 2020 is when it all turned to shit. [redacted manufacturer] would start only releasing firmware binaries with no corresponding source (his firmware is almost entirely derived from edy555's, so it's bound by the GPL license). [redacted manufacturer]'s associated companies clone my team's design, with zero changes to the PCB, and flood the market by selling at or below cost to distributors (remember, he has a LOT of capital built up from his NanoVNA sales, so he can afford to do that). As a result all Aliexpress stores that used to carry original NanoVNA V2 devices now sell clones. (Note: do not buy a NanoVNA V2 from Aliexpress. They have little to no QC and a high DOA rate.) [redacted] also uses fake order traffic on taobao to get his new listing to the #1 position and to look like the official listing.
The NanoVNA community (mainly on nanovna-users on groups.io) are kind of naive, they are completely oblivious to the GPL violations by manufacturers but they berated a volunteer contributor for forgetting to keep sources and binaries in sync, they look at my client's product being stolen as if it's nothing and even promote the clone, saying he "improved" the design when he made zero changes to the PCB, did not bother to figure out how to do proper QC, and played foul business practices to attempt to shut down my client.
With that said, I don't blame my client if they are completely turned off from open source hardware in the future. OwOComm is in no danger but I have very little motivation to do VNA projects at this point (I want to focus more on my SDR projects). Some of our team members may still be hired by our client to work on their future VNA projects, but there's no promise it will be open source since it's out of the control of OwOComm.
The current state is edy555 and all the other true NanoVNA developers make a pittance or even nothing (there are countless contributors to the open source firmware like DiSlord, they aren't getting any money out of this). I understand that most contributors aren't expecting to get paid for their work, but if you take their work and profit from it, the least you can do is make your contributions public too. Schematics and PCB layouts are not protected by copyright, so something like GPL doesn't have any legal force. GPL formalizes this for firmware/software but even then people still ignore it (see: blatant GPL violations).