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LEGO Responds to Business 2.0
Johannes K. writes "Here is an apparently official news message sent out by LEGO as a response to the recent article on mindstorms in Business 2.0. In it, LEGO states that they think it is great that people hack mindstorms and write their own software for it; in fact, they are convinced it will increase the popularity of the product. (Now there's an attitude you don't see nearly often enough.) However, they do have to protect their trademarks, and LegOS is apparently one of the victims of that. Understandable, I suppose."
The LEGO Minstorms robot has already been hacked for Forth by Ralph Hempel; logic dictates that the next step is to adapt the Artificial Mind from http://mind.sourceforge.net for LEGO Mindstorms, since the JavaScript teaching AI is also in Forth at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind/.
The name LegOS was intended to sound and read just like LEGO. I read a lame excuse about the author saying his name would be translated into "Leg" and OS was meant to mean Operating System... However he also said to take it with a wink...
I grew up with LEGO. I still think it's the coolest toy around.. so much possibilities with only your imagination as the border... i'm glad they took this stand however i don not think it has anything to do with being european (i am european btw). It is just a case of sound mind.
For all i can tell the fact that hackers creating unthought ways of using Mindstorms has made the company sell more sets than even they anticipated.. (i read somewhere an est. 100.000 against the 15.000 they thought). It certainly would be a bad idea if they were going to bite the hand that feeds them..
Besides.. the software used for mindstorms isn't their core bussiness.. it's the plastic that we play an build with...