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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."
Lego the company has held out the olive branch in a way that other comapnies should emulate. Renaming LegOS is not a huge request to show some goodwill back from the open source community.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
I think that the open source community should make a concerted effort to support the attitude. Specifically that the modification, use of open standards, and reuse of materials is not a crime, but a bennifit to many companies. "Coding is not a crime".
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
This isn't totally unexpected. There has been quite a bit of evidence with DeCSS et al than Europe, and in paticular Scandinavia takes a much lighter view on these acts than their US counterparts. In the US the attitude is "its MY toy you can't play" where as the European attitude is more "you've bought it, its your own fault if you bugger it up".
:)
Somewhat ironically in a dicussion on toys the US companies are themselves acting like spoilt toddlers. LEGOs action appears a very mature response to what isn't really a problem. You bought the product, do what you want. If you bought LEGO bricks and , shock horror, made something other than the car on the box then they'd be fine with that.
Hopefully some US companies will realise that once we buy their products we have the right to break them and use them as we want. If I want to use a CD as a coaster I will, or a frisbee or what ever.
I'll get back in my cot now
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I think that if Lego are so supportive of people hacking their software and extending it, they might consider opening their own source under the GPL or similar license. This will enable them to directly benefit from the works of the people hacking their products in order to develop better 'official' software kits for Mindstorms in the future. It's a win-win situation.
About trademark protection, they have a point. It's one thing to hack Lego code, but a totally different thing to make it look as if it's official, and I don't buy that LegOS was not intended to sound like LEGO. Changing a name is a small price to pay for a very positive attiude towards open-source and hackers by a lagre corporation.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
They could perhaps even license (with low cost but tight restrictions) the name to the software?
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
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...
This is fantastic news for those of us who just must get inside something and have a play. There are some toys that simply must be poked around with (Mindstorms, Sony AIBO, etc). As with previous posters, I'm very much of the opinion that when you buy something, it is yours to do with as you please. I commend Lego for their supportive and encouraging attitude!
What else are they gonna do, they're only an inch high, yellow and have holes in their legs! Mind you they do have some cool space craft and a jazzy train set ;)
...and name it "Non-infringing Product"
I just hope the self proclaimed geek crowd will police itselves and respect LEGO. Hacking is great... theft is an entirely different matter that has no place with hackers.
It's a great stand by LEGO to embrace the hacktivist community, and like it's been posted it's probably due, at least partly, to that factthat they blew away sales projections. Shouldn't others pick up on this business model? Not give away their products or IP items, but to allow/encourage their users to extend the original concepts in ways they hadn't thought of. Heck, look at Tivo. They have always been very encouraging of its hacking users, and think of the thousands of boxes they've sold due to that very fact alone. (I can talk since the hackability is the reason I have one on order right now.)
Heck, if anything it's really cheap R/D for new features and bugfixes.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
I've had lego since i ward born, and it's the only toy i've never thrown away. (I've since passed it to my younger cousins,etc.. to continue the tradition)
Lego is more then a toy to many, it's the beginnings of a constructive childhood and planning.
A reply like this from Lego shows not only support, but their attitude towards their toys - That lego's not about making money, it's all about building, hacking and all that bricks !
I'm going out there to buy a mindstorm set ! (And telling my frens about it)
[Remove all text before the underscore "_" to reply to me directly)
If you had read the fairplay page you would have said "I think I'll go out and buy more bricks from the LEGO(tm) group."
Tweaking Lego's tail might be fun, but there is such a thing as carrying a joke too far. Lego is being more wise and openminded that the vast majority of companies would in its shoes. We definitely need to LUNGE on this opportunity to SET a PRECEDENT, so we can hold it up to other countries in the same situation and say, "Look, Lego decided to be cool and not sue, and look how much the hackers benefitted them! You should do the same and not sue".
Precedent is good!
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
This goes to show that Lego is not only a cool toy, but a cool company too! I certainly hope that the authors of these great add-ons (in particular, LegOS) will accept this graciously-extended olive branch and find a compromise that suits everyone. Today I could really live with a world that's more friendly and less confrontational.
It's a pity that these issues so readily escalate to acrimonious exchanges and legal threats -- witness the current legal woes facing amdzone.com. Again, my commendation to Lego for taking the high road. May they enjoy continued healthy sales and goodwill with their enthusiast community.
I must say I'm impressed. After all the stupidity being perpetrated by mega-corporations lately, it's great to see a company do something thoughtful and intelligent. The letter was straightforward and reasonable - not threats, no legalese, just a well thought out explanation of their position. I had almost forgotten that corporations are capable of common sense - it feels good to be reminded.
You know, I haven't played with Legos in twenty years, but those Mindstorms do look pretty cool. Maybe I'll go out and buy a box.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
If I were Lego, I'd do two things slightly differently:
Lobby (and make clear that I'm doing so) for fair international IP law (rather than stronger international IP law), hopefully resambling that which the US had about ten years ago.
Allow some fair use of the red Lego logo (though the latter is really their call, and its certainly morally right if they wish not to do that).
Thanks, Lego! You've always had a strong sense of ethics in the types of toys you've made, and its good to see you're still carrying it on in how you interact with adults. I appreciate how your toys have always been educational and reasonably non-violent. I enjoyed your toys as a little kid, and now I can play with them again at MIT as a bigger kid, and probably my kids (when I have them) will have a huge collections of Legos as well.
I said in my posting the other day "I would be really suprised if Lego (Denmark) agree with this [Business 2.0 article]". And this press release proves that they don't.
I'm afraid that you American's need to wake up to the fact that you have a very abusive corporate mentality, which is not in the interests of anyone but the company. Many of you seem to think that Europeans are a bunch of 'socialist losers' (going by the postings on Slashdot), because we generally approve of goverment intervention to prevent abusive business practices in the free market, and most of our companies are not as aggressive as yours, as this Lego case demonstrates. However, we see it not as being losers, but as being more civilized.
I'd like to write a witty response to the article here. In fact, I'd very much ejoy talking about those little plastic bits that stick to each other with anyone who cares to listen... (picks a little plastic bit that just got flicked at him out of his coffee).
At the same time, since the corporation that makes them was very polite, I'd really like to do so without once using one of thier trademarks.
Unfortunately, now I'm at an impass.
the following text contains trademarks of the LEGO corporation. In all cases, it is my intent that the trademarks are used in good faith
My question to pose is thus. If one were to write software to drive the LEGO Mindstorm system, one would have to *eventually* write bits having to do with very definite parts of the technology. Perhaps there's a component "dingle_driver.o" or somesuch. Perhaps it's as simple as including readable code-documentation about the bit in question.
Now how could you do it if you couldn't use the name of the whatsit you were writing software about? Would the code be of higher quality? Would it be maintainable? Perhaps most importantly around here... Would it be hackable?
Possibly, most likely not.
Certainly it's possible to brand your product using something not confuseable with a trademark of a given corporation, at least at a high level, but I have to believe that at some point people name things because of what they are or what they do. Certainly it's pretty easy to determine that LegOS is either an OS for LEGOS or it's some kind of operating system for pedal-limbs.
Eventually I arrive at the thought that perhaps corporations who wish to encourage private development and tinkering ought to establish a set of licenseable trademarks. Certainly they could be spun to have recognition with the parent brand without significantly diluting the brand.
I wonder whether the Justice Department will punish Lego for failing to uphold the spirit of the DMCA.
those are the nicests worded press releases I think I've ever read. Very non-confrontational. I wish more companies had the good sense to try being nice before pummelling their most fanatic customers:--)
---
Doesn't surprise me in the slighest, frankly. If nothing else, it's been a long-standing precident with Lego that other companies are allowed to use the same dimensions for building blocks, which allows Lego blocks to be used along-side other brands in the same creation. This is the same mentality that's being applied in this instance, allowing others to create software for use with their blocks.
:) The man I spoke with said they had an easier time teaching kindegartners than those execs. Go figure, eh?
As for the title of my post, I also imagine a large portion of their decision was that the higher-ups in the company didn't know what to make of LegOS, so they asked the MIT Media Lab (who created Lego Mindstorms) what to do. I can just hear their response too, "Heck, we don't care. We would've released the source if you'd let us. What you do about the trademark's up to you, but we think the software's great!" All the while playing with one of their little "crickets" in the Lego group in the basement of the Media Lab.
On a side note, it was very interesting taking a tour of the Media Lab while top-ranking executives from several potential Mindstorms investors were huddled around a large table playing with Lego blocks and trying to write programs for them.
-Gulopine