11–20 of 42 posts
The 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…
So... rather than make not enough to pay the bills, now you make nothing yet have a giant support burden.
One 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 devic…
The 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.)
I don't recall the hardware being too separately encumbered. Sony Research provided all of the early adopters with significant technical specifications about the hardware itself, though admittedly much of it was documented in Japanese and this is ~10 years before google translate. I remember one other independent research group rewrote all of Sony's dynamic stability code and was able to increase walking speed significantly, and there was a lot of that level of information available.
One 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 devic…
There 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.
They seemed utterly blind to the awesome communities that had formed, and unable to grasp how much harm shutting down caused to so many people.
One 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 devic…
Besides the legal side of things, the code might be being built with an company internal tool-chain, and comercial compilers, so it would be a bunch of work to even get it ready for a public release. All of this reinventing of the wheel probably limits nice fixes for common bugs over the years.
One 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 devic…
Besides the legal side of things, the code might be being built with an company internal tool-chain, and comercial compilers, so it would be a bunch of work to even get it ready for a public release. All of this reinventing of the wheel probably limits nice fixes for common bugs over the years.