I'm not sure what you are hoping from "free", "community owned", and "open source".

They make mills and lathes. They are really nice little machines, great for hobby use. We have one lathe from them in our hackspace for example, and it is a delight. Of course you have to understand the limitations of the tool, but that is true for every machine.

That being said, it is just a lathe. There is nothing particularly complicated about it. At least not at their complexity level. If you can manufacture machine tools you can make one very easily. If you don't have the manufacturing capability you won't.

The reason i'm saying this is because "free as in freedom" and "open source" are properties of plans / source code. If you happen to have a lathe factory, the lack of a lathe plan is not going to stop you. You are just going to design one for yourself. And if you don't have a factory which can make a lathe, then why do you care about plans for a lathe being open source?

I guess the factory itself could be "community owned". If you have a business plan, or a large pile of cash, now is the time to approach them that you want to buy everything from them. But I'm not sure how "community owned" would even work for this use case.

Basically what I'm saying this is hardware, not software. The terms you use don't make much sense in this case.

the sherline designs aren't particularly notable, and they're pretty easy to replicate if you have working machine tools that are larger. any machinist could make a sherline mill or lathe, but without that floorspace and capex and skill, one really can't.

I spent overly long trying to learn on sherline tools and once I gave up and bought a Bridgeport and an old Logan, I realized that I was just banging my head against the limitations of the tools.

the value they had was that they were cheaper than the smaller version of the standard toolroom machines, and they were a way to bootstrap yourself without having the heavy power and the floorspace. so pretty much the storefront, not the IP. I still have their 4" rotary, and its actually not bad. the mill had a huge amount of flex in the column that made it pretty unusable for me unless you took really really tiny passes.

I had an old Unimat for a couple years, and while that was even _more_ dodgy than the sherline the fact that it was all steel and a combined mill/lathe made it a lot more interesting. would rather see some community standards for tooling on a platform like that. maybe a 50% larger so setup isn't so fiddly.