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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.
Not to mention that the more custom it is, the more similar the proprietary and open-source development methods become. If the software is completely custom, paying an open-source developer to do it is exactly the same as paying a proprietary developer. The only difference is who gets what rights at the end.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
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
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.
No, you misconstrued his point. He's not saying it's harder to customize open source apps, he's saying it's harder to get highly customized apps under an open source model. Companies that spend lots of time and monel developing the highly customized software might be less inclined to make it OSS since it gives them (the developers) very little benefit in exchange for exposing a highly valuable codebase.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
In this case, open source software is completely irrelevant. Hoboken paid for a company to build the garage, install all of the hardware and the software. Hoboken didn't write software, or buy software from some company other than the one with the tech to set up the garage. They bought the package from this company, and the company uses proprietary software. Hoboken couldn't use their own software even if they wanted to. Saying that "open source" software would help in a situation like this is about as relevant as saying that if the city's citizens only used flying cars, then this situation wouldn't happen.
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?
This never would have happened if the city's citizens had used flying cars.
What?
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
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.
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...
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.
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.