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Hoboken, NJ vs. Giant Parking Robot
markwalling writes "Wired News is running a story about Hoboken, New Jersey's battles with robotic parking. A legal battle over the license had shut down the garage, essentially trapping hundreds of cars inside. Bill Coats has recommended that the parking garage be run off open source software: 'Vendees are going to become more sophisticated in the deals they enter into.' Coats even sees this as a driver of open source software. 'If you can get (open source software) you can't be shut down.' But that's harder to do in highly custom applications."
Yes, but the code also isn't likely to exist yet. So you are going to have to hire someone to write it. And then they own the code (depending on your contract), and may not open-source it.
Or there may be one proprietary software house with code for your situation, but no open source code. In which case it is cheaper in the short term (and less risky) to just buy a licence to their code.
Remember: the more rent the programmer can charge you the more money they can make. So, if there is a company with a small speciality, it might be able to keep it's code to itself and charge rent indefinately. Open Source benifits the users directly, and only benifts the programmers indirectly, if at all.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Am I the only one seeing the lack of distinction here? There are open source apps you still have to pay to use, aren't there? And if you fail to pay, you lose your right to use the software, no? Just a nit-pick, I suppose, but just because it's open source doesn't mean it's public domain. Come on, guys, why am I of all people (a Windows Systems Admin) the first one to point this out?
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Yes, the way the article is written, that's exactly what it sounds like. However, they mention a "contract dispute", without providing any real details. The situation could have possibly been something along the lines of the contract expired, and the company wanted to jack their rates by 5000%, forcing the city to operate the garage at a financial loss, or not at all.
Without question, the city should have given greater consideration to the terms of the contract, but the motivations of all parties involved are not adequately covered by the article.
You can watch their videos at:
http://www.robopark.com/
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Actually, the $5500 probably DID go to pay the salary of a full-time employee whose main/only job was to write the software for the city's garage.
It's hard to criticize the fee without knowing the other facts, since it probably WOULD be semi-justified during the first few years of operation when the software were under constant refinement by an employee working mainly on their garage... but it would be downright immoral if they expected to be raking in $5,500/month 30, 40, and 50 years from now as well. That said, it would have been much better (if only for public relations' sake) for RP to have licensed the software in perpetuity with the garage purchase, then had a separate contract charging for revisions and rewrites (so they could technically decide at any time they were happy with the software "as is", but keep up development as long as RP's developer(s) could keep improving it enough to make it worth the city's money).
From what I've read, this is one of those situations where basically everyone involved has mud on their hands... two entities, both trying to screw, extort, and exploit each other, and ensuring that nobody will ever want to do business with EITHER party again.
The Robotic Parking website has some very agressive language (middle and bottom of page) that summarizes as "You will license this from us." I wouldn't purchase such a thing with these terms. When I purchase an item from the patent holder, I obtain explicit permission to use the item - mainly because I paid the patent holder. A patent is intended to level the playing field with regard to big and small manufacturers, not to allow a manufacturer to extort money from his customers. If I purchase your patented Widget {TM} (c) [Pat. Pend.], once the sale is complete I may grind it into a fine powder should I choose to do so. Your patent does not extend into dictating *how* I may use the product that I now own.
If the City of Hoboken got a purchase discount in exchange for Robo-Parking getting a piece of the action, that's a completely different contractual arrangement. Regardless, this contract is stinky. The elected officials who signed this turd need to be un-elected (and possibly punished.)
Well, I'd argue that it became immoral the moment it dragged innocent bystanders (the people who parked their cars) into the crossfire and turned them into collateral damage.
If one of the cars' owners flew down to Florida and was arrested for destroying the CEO's car with a baseball bat, this is the kind of case where the prosecutor would have to legally try to bind and gag the defense in court so they couldn't let the jury know WHY the defendant destroyed the CEO's car... because if they did, no jury in America would convict him or her, even if it were beyond doubt that the facts of the case indicated that he did, in fact, break the law.
It is quite a neat system. I live in Hoboken less than a block from this garage. It is true it does hold a lot of cars, more than a regular garage. But one thing you will notice is that on a busy night like Friday or sat when everyone is returning from the bars/cafe is that there is always quite a line or cars lined up waiting for their turn to get into one of the elevator bays, often for quite a while as they all get out of the cars for smoke . Makes me think it isnt quite as fast as they make it out in this article. As well as the power outage situation mentioned above (like the Big Northeast blackout of 03)I would rather keep my car on the street.
> I see this as bad coding, plain and simple. Why not just make it impossible to add vehicles to the garage when the license expires? ...because a bunch of people who can't use their cars at all are going to put a lot more pressure on the lot owner to resolve the situation quickly than those who just need to find a new place to park.
I don't think it's bad coding at all. Evil maybe, since it's certainly not the car owner's fault, but not bad coding.
-- OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.com
Because that's what the deal was. NOT paying is theft.
I can't tell you the number of jobs we've done where we didn't get paid. Some required litigation. Others required logic bombs. When they litigated, we've won 100% of the cases, and counterclaimed for legal fees and won 100% of those, too. I don't like litigation. It sucks. So does NOT PAYING YOUR LEGAL OBLIGATIONS.
We get paid for what we do. We get to PICK OUR OWN CHARITIES. And we do charity work, about 4% of what we do each year goes to 501c(3) and 501c(6). We picked them, and they like us. That's how it works.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Actually that is not that bad at all - considering all of the costs involved in this type of application. These are not simple routines when you take into account that you are tracking re-occuring vehicles and the time they are typically added/removed so that you can least-time the largest number of vehicles. That is some major simulation time for least-time under varying changes (non-standard days, repairs, etc.).
I spent just over a year as a contractor on a team doing this sort of work for a parts warehouse in OH. They had this huge automated system of lifts and trucks that would move parts around as needs. As workers would add or remove parts they scanned in the bin they were going into or taken out from - bins could be mixed parts. In fact the stockers job was to make sure that the bins were as close to 1 bin = 1 job station as they could (but they could really put the parts anywhere they wanted).
The company that bought this thing was on a 5-year lease-to-buy for the software and control hardware. They elevators, automated carts, etc. they owned outright. Thus after 5 years the company had a single buyout cost in order to own the software outfight, but leaving the development company with a perputual licence to the code based upon the revision they bought (thus we could not go back and snag any changes they made after they bought it out - and vice versa) - it was essentially forked at that point.
It was an interesting system that actually (as a side effect) really closed down on employee theft, since the storage boxes were sealed until they were scanned by people putting in or taking out. They were also weighed before they were racked - since each rack could only hold so much. Tracking down missing parts was pretty easy since everything was logged as to who opened what boxes and the weight change. There were ways to get away with things, but it made theft a hassle and pin-pointed it to a small group of people.
Programming: Its not just a job - its an indenture.
This isn't an open source issue, this isn't a coding issue, this isn't even a technology issue. This is a contract issue, plain and simple.
The Government should have written their proposal to build the garage and the accompanying contract so that they own code that runs the system. This would also allow them to have it peer reviewed by others without a vested interest in anything other than a successful peer review.
This isn't an open source issue either... While that would give the government agencies access to the code in question, it isn't like armies of engineers are going to be contributing code back to the project (although I guess it is possible). In fact, (at least in my experience with Federal Government contracting), such source code would be considered in the 'public domain', and accessible via a Freedom of Information Act request.
Personally I dont think that it was a flaw.
The conspiracist in me thinks this was a deliberate product feature to extort and put pressure on the licensee (city of hoboken) to give in or face angry users and lawsuits.
After all the news of companies like RIM extorting blackberry and shutting down their service and same with Apple music threatening to shutdown Itunes is an example of this new corporate culture. You can negotiate alot more money when you are blackmailed and pressure is involved. In the case with blackberry they gave RIM $500,000,000 for a product they never developed whose patent was ruled invalid. Amazing what we can learn from the mobfia.
Actually if I were in charge of this company I would be tempted to mandate this feature and screw whoever I could and raise the rates to exhorborant fees to renew the contracts. I would make a ton of money and its perfectly legal. I dont think I would ever sink to this low but it would certainly be on my mind if I were greedy enough.
There should be laws agaisnt this.
http://saveie6.com/
FTA: "In the course of a contract dispute, the city of Hoboken had police escort the Robotic employees from the premises just a few days before the contract between both parties was set to expire. What the city didn't understand or perhaps concern itself with, is that they sent the company packing with its manuals and the intellectual property rights to the software that made the giant robotic parking structure work" The city should have jut not let additional cars be parked and had the structure emptied. Instead they decided to strike first in the dispute and have the Robotic employees removed. That's the city's fault not the fault of the company. I'm the sole IT guy for a small company and if the fired me they would be screwed. Yeah they have all the code for all the programs I've written and all the relevant support information but it would take any replacement a while to figure out what was going on. Not to mention all the logins and passwords that are all only in my head. Should I be responsible if something happened to their systems after they fired me but before they got a replacement? The city thought it was being smart in throwing them out but in the end the company got the last laugh.
So lets keep going with your analogy.
Joe rents his house. It has a garage. One day, when I'm over at Joe's new place, I leave my car in his garage for a few days. Joe says its OK. I even pay him in beers for letting me park it there. All is well.
Then Joe's landlord evicts him and changes all the locks on the doors, including the garage. Later on, I arrive at the house, only to find it locked up and my car still inside. When I ask Joe about this, he referrs me to the landlord.
So I go to the landlord, and ask to be able to retrieve my car. The landlord refuses. When pressed on this matter he goes on and on about his property rights, waving his deed to the property about in front of everyone declaring that he is under no obligation to open any door on his property for anyone. It's his door. Joe was only leasing it from him, and now that Joe's gone, he's not opening it without payment from Joe. Joe's not paying.
You can see that the landlords property rights are conflicting with my own. If he has his way, he can essentially annex my car using his property rights. I can't get my car out without breaking the law, and any court I go to will take months to reach a judgement, and will end up costing me more than the car. I'm better off paying whatever extortion the landlord demands.
Now, instead of the Landlords property rights, what we're seeing here is one companies intellectual property rights being held over the actual property rights of people whos cars are being held to ransom. Robotic Parking have stolen the cars of the people who parked in the garage and are using them to extort the city of Hoboken. If I tried this, I'd get ten, maybe fifteen years. If a software company tries it, they'll get a big fat payoff.
There is nothing those car owners can do. They have no rights whatsoever, and will not be getting their property back until two third parties agree, which may take weeks. They can't even protest. The city is too well protected. The company is too well protected. The garage design makes it impossible for them to organise and remove the cars. Robotic Parking has accomplished what the French could never dream of realising. The mob has been made impotent.
May the Maths Be with you!