Legal Issues of Opening Up Proprietary Standards?

mrjb asks: "The Alesis HD24 is a 24-track, hard disk audio recorder with a built-in 10 megabit FTP server. To improve on file transfer speed, Alesis offers an external Firewire drive with a program called FST/Connect which reads the disks under Windows. I've contacted Alesis about a Linux solution, but none is planned. Also, they are (understandably) not very eager to reveal the file system specs. After a few days of staring at hex codes, I now know enough about the FS to read HD24 IDE disks under Linux (no Firewire required). As I know I benefit from the efforts of the Samba and OpenOffice teams, I'd love to share this info. I'm not, however, the least bit interested in Alesis suing me (in fact, I might want to send them my CV at some point). What would your advice be in such a delicate situation of conflicting interests?"

Comments

Re: Work with the company?

[Nevynxxx]

Why not get your working driver, and email the company asking if they would release a driver written by you in any form. Then negotiate either payment, or open-ness.

This has certainly been done before....

[King_TJ]

The music industry is notoriously "closed mouthed" about letting anyone know how their electronic products work at a technical level. Ever since the mid 80's or so though, companies have been reverse-engineering these instruments and devices, and *selling* commercial products that work with them, not to mention work on freeware projects along the same lines.

For example, I used to own a Roland S-50 sampling synthesizer. It saved its sample data on 720K 3.5" floppy disks. But people with PCs quickly realized it would be much more useful if you could take standard WAV sound files and dump them into the synth via MIDI. Many other makes and models of sampling synths and rack-mounted samplers were in the same boat. The manufacturers (like Roland) had poor documentation for the MIDI "system exclusive" commands that would be required to upload or download the sample data, so a few people worked at reverse engineering all of this on their own. Eventually, prodcuts were sold like "SampleVision" which knew how to do this for many dozens of samplers on the market.

Rather than being sued, it seemed like the synth makers actually ended up endorsing the products, providing links to them from their own web sites - because they learned it made their products more desirable to purchase.

It's painteted.

[oliverthered]

"With their patent-pending method of writing to the hard drive HD24 and HD24XR are the first hard disk recorders built from the ground up"

So, go look up the patent (not need to do any reverse engineering and send it off to someone who lives in a country that doesn't have software patents. They will then be free to write a driver, but you won't be able to because you live in the US and have silly patent laws.

They may try and sue your arse if you send them a linux driver and ask them distribute it because you've already infringed upon their patent.

Note, it looks like the patent is still pending as none of the patents listed seem to be for a file system.