If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
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If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
#2One reason that "just open source it" isn't as easy as it sounds is that there tend to be a lot of IP restrictions, patenting and licensing encumbrances, NDAs, etc. that would take effort to identify much less resolve. When companies, like Sun, open sources various software, it took considerable effort to nail down all the problems and remove the parts that weren't there's to open source--which in the case of a device like a camera might well make the whole thing useless.
Re: If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
#3A couple months ago I was looking for database schema comparison and syncing tools. I found a product that looked promising so I clicked over to the product pricing page and was really confused as all of the products were listed as $0. Turned out that it was, from what I understand, essentially a one man software company that wasn't very profitable so after a period of time the owner/developer, Matt Whitfield, decided to just start giving away his products for free and open source them.
http://www.atlantis-interactive.co.uk/blog/default.aspx
The schema compare tool ended up doing exactly what I needed and Matt even provided support. What was so impressive though was that the database tool suite was becoming competitive with products from Red Gate and now they are all free and OSS.
Re: If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
#4Just because the product was 'killed' certainly doesn't mean the technology or knowledge associated with the technology disappear. I'm sure IBM has put the software used for Deep Blue to use as a service in decision making software or other products, and that Sony has probably assimilated code from AIBO and QRIO into other products as well.
Re: If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
#5There are three reasons why organizations and people don't open source their failed projects.
* Intellectual property issues * Pride * Pride
Don't underestimate the power of emotion, especially when it involves failure.
Re: If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
#6It would be amazing if Palm Inc. released the BeOS source code, after a few years without using it.
I think it could have changed the history of personal computers OS. Fortunately we still have Haiku OS, but it will take some time until get stable.
Re: If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
#7The AIBO used a proprietary commercial operating system and required a separate set of commercial compilers to produce valid code.
When I was working on it through a special arrangement with Sony Research, I made a bunch of perl scripts that could munge the assembly generated from gcc so that the assembler could generate code that worked properly on the robots, but there were still a large number of very expensive commercial licenses between it and being OS compatible.
I unfortunately can't go into much more detail than that, because I believe I'm still covered by an NDA I signed back in ~1997 :-)
Re: If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
#8So... rather than make not enough to pay the bills, now you make nothing yet have a giant support burden.
Re: If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
#9Don't kill it, if open sourced there are hackers who will fix/improve where you failed.
Re: If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It
#10The AIBO used a proprietary commercial operating system and required a separate set of commercial compilers to produce valid code. When I was working on it through a special arrangement with Sony Research, I made a bunch of perl scripts that could munge the assembly generated from gcc so that the assembler could generate code that worked properly on the robots, but there were still a large number of very expensive co…
That's interesting, and your Perl scripts sound like the sort of thing I would utterly fail at were I to attempt to create them. What about the hardware of the robots though? Would all of the various interesting parts be covered by patents, etc., and thus be unsuitable for opening up? (Sorry if my questions tread on NDA territory - that's one long-lived NDA.)