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'Open Funding' For Driver Development
Doc Ruby writes "The TreoCentral community has announced a bounty for the first BlueTooth SDIO driver delivered for the Treo 600 (PalmOS 5). The thread shows the development of both the requirements of the quarry, and the contributions to the bounty. If this process works, is 'open funding' of development the next wave of the emerging online community? How will the 'traditional' vision/scope> requirements> features> >recode> retest> demo> cycle expand to include the user community in the financing?" Update: 06/16 19:43 GMT by T : Updated the bounty link to a server better able to handle it.
The bounty is only valid until September 6, 2004 - so let's get coding!
Cliesource.com had created a contest for the development of a compact flash driver for the Sony Clie line. Some developers said that Cliesource did not give developers enough time to develop a working driver but the contest did help getting a working driver into circulation.
http://nyamenation.org/
There's a more readable version of the story on treocentral's stories page
I remember when the Blender 3D software was bought from the company NaN for $100,000, there was some speculation that it might not be a good thing if this kind of trend continues. Granted, this is a bit different. But maybe instead of just developing drivers, companies would wait around for someone to generate a big pot of money to make it worth it for them.
Remember SourceXchange? Remember CoSource?
.COM madness, and have since gone the way of the do-do. I was involved with one SourceXchange project and they had the most robust/complete bidding process of the two.
They occurred during the height of the
I remember that CoSource had trouble attracting people to bid on projects. There were a number of interesting ideas, but little money.
With SourceXchange the typical project was a semi-large idea with semi-real funding from somewhere (in my case it was Ricoh's research lab). I participated as an expert/reviewer and the coder-guy received only $10,000 or so for a whole lotta work. Not a good hourly rate if you ask me.
- David
This is essentially what they do at TopCoder all the time. It's a neat way to show off your skills and make a little money on the coding side and a discounted development cost for the company. Pretty slick idea.
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The Horde Project does the same thing. They have bounties for writing specific features for their framework.
So long as the project is very narrow and specialized, I don't think it's a bad thing. This particular example, though, is very broad and we as the end users may not end up getting good code from the "losers" incorporated into that driver.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
It's not bloody likely. On two counts. The first being that the Treo 600 may not be compatable. I chased down individuals at the last PalmSource and tried to get to the bottom of why the 802.11 SD drivers where not being released. The main answer was that on some devices, the card would draw too much power (802.11 suck current, fancy that!) and could even fry the unit. ouch!
The second is more political than anything else. Starting with OS 5.0 (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) the drivers aren't as easy to hack, the least of which is that they have to be in native ARM (as opposed to the PACE layer) Hell Armlets^H^H^H^H^H^H^H PNO's where like pulling teeth to write till resently). Things get worse in OS 6.0/Cobalt where the vendor can choose (and PalmOne will, if they ever release a Cobalt device) to require the drivers be signed in order to run. Great for preventing viruses, sucks for hackers such as myself that might want to hack on a device that I may not care to sell/commit to developer fees that may apply.
And all this before reverse engineering the card itself. Better off to wait and hope that PalmOne releases a Treo with Bluetooth built in (nudge, wink)
That aside, no hurt in trying!
Anyway, it sounds like Peter Easton at Whizoo has already suggested a starting point - rip the BT drivers from the Tungsten|T and rewrite the Palm OS 4 SD-BT transport layer PRC for ARM/OS 5. If all this driver does is receive calls from the main BT driver and dispatch calls/receive callbacks to/from the documented SD API, then perhaps it's not too difficult to rip it apart and figure out what it's doing and rewrite it? That's a big if of course. I've never really reverse engineered a Palm app myself, though I've done a decent amount of Palm OS programming (games and apps).
But apparently IDA Pro supports Palm OS and M68k, so that might provide a reasonable route to disassembling the OS 4 transport layer PRC. Anyway, that's about as far as I've gotten with this - if anybody is interested, let me know, I do have some free time right now and I wouldn't mind putting it into solving this rather annoying problem (no, I don't really give a hoot about the bounty, but I'm going to go contribute 50 bucks to it anyway - I'd pay 100 bucks right now just for a copy of a BT driver that let me use my damn Treo 600).
Yeah, a little.
A lot of hardware R&D now goes, not just into the actual hardware, but into the firmware and driver that are required to make the hardware work. And while it seems like a copout, there are often good reasons that a company wouldn't want to give its competitors access to the work that went into that firmware/driver. Any time a competitor can gain access to your expensive, paid for development, for less than you paid to develop it, a company is not likely to do so - unless, like OpenOffice/Linux/etc, there's enough likelihood of external development that your contribution earns you the right to use a lot of someone else's work. OSS only works corporately when the corporation says "If we put in X, we get to use software worth Y" where Y>X, often Y>>X. Unfortunately, in hardware this is rarely the case, as a competitor could just clone your circuits (not hard) and your openly released firmware, never improve the firmware except when you do, and sell the hardware cheaper than you can because they didn't have to fund any development of firmware/drivers.
In addition, there's the everpresent FCC bogie, which the companies that do wireless hardware use as a "Hey, if we give you totally unfettered access to the card's abilities, you could do something illegal with it, which would come back to haunt us". Unfortunately, they're probably right - it would come back to haunt them.
So, yeah, the idea that hardware is going to opensource its software is flawed, I think.
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