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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."
Another great example for adopting F/OSS. Somene get on this. CARS WANT TO BE FREE!
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
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."
Er...BECAUSE it's open source, it's easier to customize. That's one of the major selling points.
Maybe someone missed that memo.
Subject change; This company is based in Clearwater, FL. Anybody else get a sneaking suspicion that this has something to do with scientology?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
FTP:the city of Hoboken had police escort the Robotic employees from the premises
Isn't it the robots usually escorting the humans from the building...?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
This is a serious contender in the most non-understandable posts on slashdot ever. Aren't you supposed to be able to understand what it's about without reading the linked article?
Maan
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
Wait, let me get this straight. Local government has the police escort the company agents off the premesis because negotiations broke down. Basically, they figured "we already have the garage, so we don't need you any more. Bye, losers!"
And then complains because it breaks?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I, for one, welcome our closed source car trapping Giant Robots overlords
Substitute cars with documents and "robotic parking lot" with DRM and you have the same result.
Do we really want to be held up for ransom by some company that has locked our data into their container ?
See also this article where vital information is held up if you do not pay... the point is that it is my data, not somebody else data !!!! as if since I put some money in the bank then the bank can refuse to give my money back or to stop moving to another bank. (I hope I am not giving new ideas to banks here...)
The article on locking medical data is here
Bait and switch! Bait and switch! It could have at least thrown a few cars around and eaten somebody, but no!
Tokyo was never attacked by a software license, I'll bet.
My problem with spontaneous human combustion is that never seems to happen to the "right" people.
I initially read the title of the article as "Hoboken Ninja vs. Giant Parking Robot", which would have made a much more interesting story than the actual article. Who cares about legal battles? Give me real ultimate power!
09
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.
Robots are controlled by computers, with software. The city used to have a license for the software to operate the robots. Now they don't, so they can't operate the robots to remove the cars. If the software was open source, they would still have the license for it, so they could still use the robots.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
You get what you negotiate.
Like the garage itself, this software company has costs, too. There are wages, benefits, a building, taxes, and everything else that a business needs to survive.
It matters not if the city can afford it-- they agreed to it, then threw the guys out. Now it's a matter for civil litigation.
Who needs to be responsible for this gaffe? The city attorneys. I'll be I know what law school they went to, too.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
http://www.woehr.de/engl/source/frameset.htm
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Assuming the cars were trapped because the software recognized its license had expired and refused to operate (as opposed to merely being fragile and needing constant tweaking and babysitting by Robotic Parking staff), this was an INCREDIBLY stupid stunt to pull.
Absolutely, positively NOBODY with a gram of sanity is going to want to do business with them going forward. Smart move, guys.
The SMART way to timebomb the software (if it truly had to be done) would have been to program a soft landing... enabling the removal of cars already in the garage without restriction, and maybe even allowing new cars to be parked, but adding progressively longer delays (with obvious system messages, like "Delaying for 90 seconds due to software license expiration") to give the garage's owners time to digest the situation and react. Progressively annoying someone into action is one thing... holding them ransom with a metaphorical gun to their head is another matter entirely. I wouldn't be HAPPY with the former, but I'd be positively OUTRAGED over the latter.
The fee was decided in arbitration after the city apparently thought they could pull a fast one on a contract they had agreed to and ended up shooting themselves in the foot.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Heres another site with some animations showing how it works:
http://www.robopark.com/
Looking at the site you posted, it looks like the cars are stacked on top each other, with nothing in between (or if there is anything, you can't see it. I'd sure hate to have someone's clunker dripping oil onto my windshield.
With the optional plug-in, the garage can become Carparkatron, defender of Hoboken.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
You can watch their videos at:
http://www.robopark.com/
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
That does not sound unreasonable. Thought it would depend on how big the garage is, how many cars per day, and the daily parking rate, $5500/month actually sounds rather inexpensive to me. To your other point, you would be hard pressed to find a full-time developer for $66K (fully burdened- including salary, health plan, sick days, 401k, etc.).
It's more than just development cost - think of the testing required. Because this is dealing with automobiles, which are most folks' second most valuable asset, the system has to be extremely reliable. That reliablity doesn't just happen. It requires planning, coding, testing to a much higher degree than the latest open source mp3 ripper. It doesn't necessarily come cheap. A vendor must be able to recoup its costs and make a profit, or else you won't get innovative solutions like this anymore.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
$5500 a month? For software to manage the garage? That's roberry, plain and simple.
Based on what? Do you know if they charged anything for the software up front? Perhaps the operators of the garage preferred to consider the software as part of their monthly overhead instead of as a large up-front purchase. And most likely they get some sort of NON-billed support time as part of that monthly tab. There's probably some other services tangled up in that, too - like off-site backups and mirroring.
When it somes down to brass tacks, this $5500 fee was cooked up arbitrarily by the Robotic.
What, but, say... $2500 would not have been arbitrary? How do you know that their closest competition isn't very close in price because of the costs and the business model? Do you consider your salary or hourly rate to be arbitrary?
That works out to $66,000 a year. They could pay their own devel to make software to keep that place running AND add new functionality as needed
No way. Not even close. Unless you're saying that $66k would pay for ALL of the overhead of keeping that person around. Salary. Benefits. Infrastructure. Dev platform. Backups. Documentation. And if so, the net take-home for a person whose entire overhead is $66k would be about $25k, tops. Is that the person that you think is going to be able to live in the mid-Atlantic area and, with good worldly experience, be trusted to keep that system in good shape, let along change it? Even if you could hire such a person for so little, why on earth would they stay? And then you have the cost of training and replacing and retaining someone else. $66k doesn't even come close.
don't think it's not cost effective to have in-house development in this case.
Start factoring in the disruptive costs of losing/firing someone, of mitigating risk so that only one person isn't dealing with the code that moves cars around and deals with people's money, and I think that's actually exactly wrong. I say this from the perspective of having been on both ends of buying/providing coding and integration services, and of being a consultant on projects before, during, and after all of this stuff finally gets looked at (by the end users) with a rational eye. There's more to it than you think.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
Presuming a 30-month, there are 720 hours in that month. NJ state mimimum wage goes up to 7.15 on Oct 1st. At that rate, that's A 24-hour a day parking attendant would cost 5148. $5500 a month in software developer fees was just paid for by the former attendant.
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.)
Anyone could open-source the software, but let's see them open souce the drivers! Gettit, drivers?
Thankyou, thankyou, I'll be here all week, try the veal...
Yeah, open source is great and would have solved this problem, but the root of this problem isn't closed source software, it's an insanely stupid purchasing agreement on the part of Hoboken Government. The Wired article talked about open source and legislative remedies, but they nailed the solution to this problem with two words: buyer beware.
If Hoboken had the "Robotic employees" [glad "Robotic was capitalized there] escorted off the premises, presumably Hoboken owns this garage. They must have spent lord knows how much money to build this state-of-the-art robot parking garage they own, and then they plan to indefinitely lease the software by the month, and of course the whole thing is worse than worthless without it.
Who would buy something under those terms? I can't imagine making a major investment where someone else is in complete control of it and gets to re-bill me whatever they want whenever they want or else the whole thing becomes useless.
I don't know what Robotic's terms with their other customers are, but it makes sense to run this the way most things are run- either let Robotic build and run the whole thing, or else pay for the whole thing (including software) and own it all. Don't buy all of it but one critical, irreplaceable part, which you rent.
Sure, there are lots of people who get service contracts from the manufacturer and such, but there are generally alternate vendors available for these. This is like buying a car, and then leasing the copy-proof key for it from the dealer.
Their new deal is for just under $200,000 to lease a piece of software for three years. I don't know how complex this software is, and it's used in an application where it's critical that it not be buggy, but I bet there are a lot of programmers here who would love to develop a project they could lease to each user for $66,000/year, without ever actually selling a license. Especially if it would ruin the user's multi-million dollar investment if they ever stopped paying for the license.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I would no recommend going OS for a system that prone to critical failures, like large automated parking systems, for number of reasons:
1) Liability - any failure is at large your responsibility, developers can be knowingly negligent and not be liable in any way
2) Support - you OS product might not have any support, if it does its costs are not fixed and you have to tie part of your budget into emergency and contingency funds
3) Standard compliance - forget ISO or any safety/regulations compliance
4) Need for internal support - OS will require you to maintain dedicated personnel capable of troubleshooting the system
OS works well for non-critical wide-use applications but I don't see it moving into other areas in the near future.
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.
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.
The car pallets are designed not to allow this to happen.
So no drips or other such things falling onto your car.
Still, sounds like a safe place to sleep for the night...
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Let me give you a practical metaphor for it all. Let's say that Joe Average is fresh out of college, got his new job, and needs a home. So his options are buy a home, or rent a home. Buying it costs waay too much, but Joe can rent a decent home for, say, $1000 per month. So he rents it, pays his $1000 for the first month, and moves in. The first month goes by and Joe decides "wth, I already have the house, why should I keep paying for it?" So he refuses to pay for the next month. He even calls the cops to escort the landlord out, when said landlord tries to negotiate getting his money, and proceeds to sue the landlord and paint him as a monster to the media. Only a monster could extort another $1000 out of Joe, under such threats as kicking him out of his home, obviously.
Do you get the idea that Joe is a complete cretin by now? Does it invoke thoughts along the lines of, "nobody can be _that_ stupid, dude. Everyone would know it doesn't work that way," perchance?
Because that's a literal analogy for what those guys tried to do with the robotics software. What Joe in my example does with the house, the municipality official did with the software. Literally.
The municipality basically _could_ have paid to develop the software and the garage from scratch (F/OSS or not), but I'd bet that it would have been a lot more expensive, took longer, and ran a non-zero risk of ending up over-budget and dragging for years past the deadline, leaving you with a garage that doesn't work. And I really mean a _lot_ longer, because you also have to thoroughly test it, review the code, etc, to be sure it doesn't do something extremely stupid. (E.g., you don't want it to malfunction and move an elevator while a car is only half-way in it, destroying the car in the process.) At that point, you can probably have it GPL'ed or whatever, since you paid for it from scratch.
Or you could do what they did, and buy an _almost_ off-the-shelf solution for a fraction of the price. (Yes, it's not "off the shelf" in the sense of buying it at Wal Mart like you could buy a copy of Office, but still, an existing solution. Or at least something that only needs some small changes, as opposed to starting from scratch.) At which point, you get to take whatever the heck license you can get for those money.
Furthermore, presumably to save some money, they only rented that software for X years. Then when the deadline went, the municipality basically thought "muahahaha, why pay some more when we already have the software? Look at all the money we could save by running the software without a license. Let's shaft the developpers instead." And they even literally call the cops to kick the developper's employees off the premises.
Which, sorry, is just unethical and stupid. I can't feel any empathy for them in that kind of situation.
Furthermore, then when the software stopped working without a valid license, they tried to villify the developpers in the media, as well as drag them to court. As if they had some sacred/constitutional right to run a garage with stolen software, and the developpers were such monsters to deny them this opportunity.
Does it sound like complete slimeballs by now? Because it sure as heck does to me. Imagine that someone ignores your license (GPL or whatever floats your boat), and then they sue _you_, and try to paint _you_ as some monster to the media for trying to enforce your license. That kind of complete sleazeballs.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Pretty much. I question why the City of Hoboken ever involved themselves with these people. It sounds like a real boondoggle; you assumedly pay for the garage/machinery, but then once you get it, you can't operate it yourself, you have to agree to let them come and "manage" the whole thing for you, forever.
And what do you do if they decide to raise their rates? You're S.O.L. -- if you don't like what they're going to charge you to manage your robotic garage, then your garage magically stops working.
It's like the ultimate no-bid contract. There can't ever be any competition for the operation of that garage, because only that one company can do it.
What a load of crap; if I were a resident who had my tax dollars spent on a lock-in like that, I'd be pretty annoyed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So I guess the prediction of automated parking that was shown in "I, Robot" wasn't that far off after all.
Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
From http://www.nj.com/news/jjournal/index.ssf?/base/ne ws-0/1154154297217660.xml&coll=3
Hmmm, sounds like someone has been taking lessons from Darl McBride ...
And from http://www.hudsonreporter.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=12 91&dept_id=523585&newsid=16980856&PAG=461&rfi=9
I guess 99.99% reliability means only one in 10,000 cars gets totaled.
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.
Read over 50 comments from local Hoboken residents on http://hoboken411.com/archives/3524/ This debacle continues and despite the heroic statements from our inept town government, it still stinks.
A legal phrase is often used, "in lieu of liquidated damages" that applies there directly.
Don't do the deal if you don't want things to stop freaking cold as frozen carbon dioxide should you decide not to pay. This gives me an exercise-able lean on what you do. I think it's a great thing. Don't like it?
Then don't blow your integrity by purposefully not honoring the contract.
This is very simple. The city shouldn't have signed the deal, in my estimation. And I 100% sympathize with the developers. It's not extortion- it's an inured obligation. There is a huge difference. The ends-justify-the-means is bad policy and poor integrity. It's also cowardly.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Can you believe these freakin robots Tony?
I dunno Frankie, Robot that big, must have huge balls.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
And what do we learn from this whole thing?
That argument via analogy is utterly pointless.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
As a Hoboken resident, I can tell you that the parking situation is horrendous. There are many times that the city's very narrow streets are either nearly impassible or just impassible because of the parking problems. At one point a few years ago, the mayor put the city under an illegal lockdown because the parking problems were just so severe.
There are a few major parking garages in the city, and parking is a high premium. Also, there is a college (Stevens Institute of Technology, where I attend classes) that takes up a large portion of the city with its own parking lots. There is a long-standing conflict over the parking the school would provide to the city in one of its new buildings.
The city is very small (approximately 2 square miles) and very dense (approximately 500,000 full-times residents). The reason for the size and density is the city's proximity to downtown Manhattan and the financial district (the city is quite literally directly across the Hudson River from downtown and midtown Manhattan). The road system dates back to the late 1600s and is mostly very narrow streets with limited parking. This is something that I can't stress enough, as its a cause of the traffic and parking problems.
These lots were designed as a means to try to get rid of some blockages and to provide parking to residents. Unfortunately, the effect was relatively limited. The garage was an extra fee on top of an already-required Hoboken-specific decal for parking four or more hours.
That said, with the problems that the city government has had in the past, it doesn't surprise me that something like this would be done. It's not so much an argument of open-source versus closed-source software, as it is about government responsibility. The city, to my knowledge, did not take account of the fact that the contract was to end in a few days, or that there were residents' cars in the lot. Instead of posting notices that the cars had to be emptied on this date (in order to remove the equipment, this just "happened."
City government and its poor planning is to blame for this, not software liscensing and F/LOSS vs. closed source.
freeflux-powered open-source blog
A few factoids I can contribute from having followed this in the local press:
:(Boston Globe article) (http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/200 6/01/30/robodude_wheres_my_car/). I personally know a couple who had the door torn off their car by it. As far as I know, the robogarage contractor paid for the damages.
p olitics-in-hoboken.html#5corruption. Can't claim to know enough to say for sure that source is authoritative. However, based on their track record, my inclination is to believe a good percentage of any charges of corruption or malfeasance on the city's part are justified.
The garage has killed two cars
The robotic parking folks were fighting with the city from day one, when the garage was still under construction. An (openly biased) account of the city's history with the garage is here: http://mistersnitch.blogspot.com/2005/01/parking-