Open-Sourcing Discontinued Hardware

LinuxWhore asks: "I work for a company that recently accquired two 3Com/USR TOTALswitch units. It seemed as though we had I nice product by the price that they were going for online ($1500-$3000). However, further research had revealed to me that 3Com had decided to discontinue all work on the line shortly after their merger. All updates to the product have thus ceased. Now I am left in a situation where the product has little documentation and no chance of future security/bugfixes. If companies like 3Com were petitioned to release the souce and hardware specs to their dicontinued products, how much interest would there be in the community to write updates to code for these types of products so that they remain useful, instead of becoming a $3000 doorstop?" It's a good idea. Convincing the hardware makers will be the difficult part.

Comments

Re:Support of Discontinued Products

[Chas]

The reason 3Com is not supporting the TotalSwitch anymore (and I have one too, it's a SWEET piece of hardware) is that they already had a competing line of products (Their SuperStack switches). Depending on who takes over development of the code patches: The issue is the 100bT, it's not duplex, though it was supposed to be duplex upon market emergence, and was to be patched when they (USR) got sucked into the 3Com conglomerate. Personally, I'd be willing to contribute money (some, I'm not rich), webspace (which I have in abundance), or whatever, to support a project designed to bring the product up to the promised specs, buy/develop the rights to the firmware code, etc.


Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!

There is no economic reason to do so

[ravenwing_np]

It would cost very little for a company to release the documenation for obsolete hardware and allow the Open Source community to maintain it. The problem is they would lose sales for new products. Without the new sales, they can't improve the product line more, and they fall by the wayside. That is a bit extreme, but it is something that should be considered.

Obsolecense (<-- is that a word?)

[TheTomcat]

Companies discontinue products all the time. Usually it's because the product has lived it's useful life, and needs to be replaced, or their estimated profit margin wasn't fulfilled.

Not to be a conspiracy theorist, or anything, but I know sometimes companies discontinue a line of products so they can introduce a new line of similar products, and sell to their current customers who now have 'obsolete' products.

They've essentially just forced a bunch of clients to use unsupported gear, or pay someone(hopefully them) to replace it. If this is the case, open-sourcing would be counter-productive.

Branding!

[laborit]

I don't see why this should be a difficult sell for any hardware manufacturer who's gotten out of stone-age source code jealousy. Why should they object to putting their boxes and their brand name on your desktop? The situation should be no different from the one in which Nike(TM) does everything it can to get its logo on the chests of millions, even if they're not athletes and say nothing about the quality of their shoes. If your IT people go to work and see "3COM(TM)" every day; if the administrators have the 3com(TM) name in front of them so that it's the name that pops into their head when its time to make more purchasing decisions; if they can generally get their name hard-coded into your product-inertia... how could they refuse?

Companies may not care about extending the life of products they no longer support. But extending the reach of their name -- that's something you can sell them on.

- Michael Cohn

make it a service

[criticalrealist]

It's incredibly wasteful for both companies like 3Com and their customers to junk old equipment instead of upgrading and maintaining old equipment. It's better at least to relegate old equipment to auxiliary duty. So why buy a piece of hardware if you could buy a service?

A company like 3Com could agree to provide a certain number of ethernet switch ports in working order at your site for a monthly fee. They can update and upgrade the product at their leisure. If their equipment stops working for a previously agreed time period (maybe if it has less than 99.99% uptime per month), then you pay nothing that month. Once they replace your equipment, they take the old equipment and either recycle it or reuse it. This would be a more efficient system because every party has a strong incentive to avoid waste.

With this system, there would be no need to open the specs or source code of obsolete hardware, because companies would be offering free firmware and driver upgrades for much longer periods of time.

Economics? How about environmental reasons!

[dattaway]

It would cost very little for a company to release the documenation for obsolete hardware and allow the Open Source community to maintain it.

I love recycling --especially the kind where hardware gets a new lease on life in ways we never dreamed.

Economic reasons? Think environmental. Think of the savings when our environment is concerned. Yeah, I know, most people don't give a damn about all that toxic lead used to solder those several layer circuit boards or worse yet all the chemicals needed to move them through hundreds of costly steps in production.

Let's promote green open source solutions and the companies that support them.

Support of Discontinued Products

[Detritus]

I would be asking 3COM why they are not supporting their own products, even if they were acquired in a merger, and if this indicates the level of support that customers can expect when current product lines are discontinued. Why should the customers be expected to take over the sustaining engineering? Even with source code and schematics, are the customers going to have the software and hardware tools needed to generate updates?

3com and obsolete hardware

[Alan Cox]

With things they own like the old network cards 3COM have been extremely good. I asked for documentation on the etherlink MC/32 and not only got documents back, but on paper. The times I've had problems with 3com docs have been when 3com dont own all the rights, when they are still filing patents on the hardware and it might cause them a problem that way.

Stuff like the TC boxes they probably don't own all the rights to. The code they use undoubtedly contains large licensed components and I can quite believe they dont _have_ good documentation except for the source to release.

Certainly when I worked for 3com rapops we had stuff inherited from Sonix that had basically -no- hardware documentation.

As vendors go 3com have been one of the most supportive to Linux, but I don't think you can expect them to do the due dilligence to release sections of code or go off and write docs for random dead junk switches. Maybe if you offer
to cover their costs for the process ? Do you love
the hardware enough to offer them $20K to do the work - remembering the HW may be too specialist to run any normal OS.

not always easy to open-source..

[sommerfeld]

Having done some work on the periphery of the embedded networking space, there may be a few obstacles to the hardware vendor open-sourcing their code, or even releasing specs which would allow others to develop software for the box:

• The vendor might not have the right to release specs for third-party chips on board (specs may only be available under non-disclosure)
• The vendor might not be able to release all the code running on the box, since it may have been licensed from third parties.
• They may no longer have the information at all. Chances are parts of the necessary information only existed in the heads of engineers that no longer work there..

Simple.

[Kooki Monster]

The /. community is mostly made up of IT support staff, a lot of SysAdmins and a handful of people that matter decision wise. All that needs to be done, assuming everbody can stop bickering and hold the same thought in their heads for more that 10 seconds, is to write a letter to 3Com, for example, and tell them that we're after the specs / source for their discontinued hardware, and if we don't get it, we'll all go off to Cisco, or other appropriate rival, next time we need something. It's called blackmail. Whenever said company releases the docs, we turn to Cisco and and tell them that now 3Com have opened up, you have to do the same or you can kiss our checkbooks goodbye. That bit's about market share. Now, all we need is somebody that can liason, is semi-responsible and doesn't mind pestering companies. I nominate CowboyNeal. Job done.

You won't get the source.

[Chagrin]

The reason is a no-brainer: 3com has every reason not to release the information for those old switches because they want them to die. The sooner they pass out of the market, the sooner they can sell new hardware. You can't blame them for this -- it only makes sense.

Argue the point all you want, but what needs to be done is getting the information for new hardware, as it's released. Only time and added pressure on the hardware manufacturers is going to make this a reality.

Product Lifecycle

[jerdenn]

All technical products have a product lifecyle - in the computer industry, this lifecyle is usually quicker, as a business shifts internal resources from an older, 'mature' product, into the developement of new, 'innovative' technologies.

The lifecycle of an at-market product is recognizable by four distinct phases:

General Availability: Selling is unrestricted in target markets. Carrier for new technology introductions. Marketing efforts to actively promote product. Resources allocated to enhancing and maintaining existing product.

Functional Stability: Product not targeted for new sales. Available to existing customers only, and resources allocated only to fixing major 'bugs'.

Maturity: This phase is often combined with Functional Stability. Sales are suspended, and existing fixes are made available, but no resources allocated to fixes. Limited support provided.

Retirement: Product is discontinued. Support, if available, is not dedicated, and often comes with surcharge.

Companies rely upon the product lifecycle to ensure that their Generally Available products are successfull. By extending the usefullness of products in the Retirement phase, GA products will be adversely impacted.

It is therefore not in the best interest of most companies to open spec hardware in the Retirement phase, nor is it benificial for a software company to open source Retired software products.

There may, however, be advantages to open spec or open source earlier in the product lifecycle.

-jerdenn

It does sound like a good idea

[eap]

But I can see two reasons why hardware companies might be unlikely to opensource their designs:

1. Said hardware contains design secrets used in current products.

2. Designs employ proprietary specs possibly used under license from other companies.

If I'm not mistaken, #2 is one reason why IBM is unlikely to ever opensource OS/2. Doesn't it contain some code written by MS?

It can't hurt to push for open hardware though. I would like to see these companies contribute something back to the community that has made them so wealthy.