Slashdot Mirror
If You're Going To Kill It, Open Source It
ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine is proposing big companies like Cisco and Sony consider 'open sourcing' their failed or discontinued products. The list includes Sony's AIBO and QRIO robots, IBM's Deep Blue chess computer, Ricochet Wireless, Potenco's Pull-Cord Generator, Palm, Microsoft's SPOT Watch, CISCO Flip Camera and more. MAKE is also encouraging everyone to post about what products they'd like to see open sourced."
Opensource the Space Shuttle :)
No text needed outside of subject.
"Palm" is on the list. In its entirety. Low blow lol.
I thought I kept up with news for nerds, but I missed that one. When did AIBO die? Was there an outcry, like a great disturbance in the force or anything?
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Not going to happen for two reasons:
- More often than not, technology or techniques developed from said projects are used in future or ongoing projects.
- Only one thing worse than your project failing is releasing it in the wild and having another company or group making it successful without you.
All products would most likely need an audit which would take both time and money...to avoid any legal trouble that could happen. Something I doubt either company would do for the sake of giving people free shit. But you never know, maybe they have higher moral fiber than I think :)
These companies don't want to compete against their own products (released to open source). They'd rather make these products disappear forever, and force customers to buy the newest gadgets.
Basically it's the same strategy Microsoft follows when it refuses to open source Windows 3 or 95 or XP.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
The company doesn't necessarily own all the rights to all the components. My dad and I wrote a BASIC interpreter for the PC in the 80s, but when we decided we wanted to release the source, we realised that Walter Bright owned the code that we had licensed to do the floating point arithmetic.
If anyone wants to take on an MS-DOS BBC BASIC interpreter written in assembly, and fancies writing a new module to do floating point to replace the code in question, let me know and I'll talk to my dad about it again.
I misunderstood the intent of the title as "if you want to kill something, open source it"... which would make sense considering how more and more open source projects are being shot down in flames by lawsuits and patent claims.
Once they are - say - 10 years old - the complete source and schematics of the ECU, as well as all other parts of the car are revealed.
Too many licensing issues and agreements with other companies. At least that's the excuse IBM gave against open-sourcing OS/2. Damn, linux would be amazing with a modernized WPS :(
I thought that the .NET Micro Framework (the platform that the SPOT watch was based) is currently open source. At least, you can port it to the platform of your choice. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=16fa5d31-a583-4c0d-af74-f4d5e235d5bc
That should be the law..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Even though something is "failed or discontinued", that doesn't mean that there are a lot of patents based on it. Open sourcing some of these would probably raise the wrath of the legal departments. So I guess a lot of companies would rather decide to just sit on the stuff, instead of opening some other can of legal worms . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's a nice thought, but with all the crazy patent litigation going around, why would moneyed corporations put themselves at risk? Too many vultures out there.
If you put an alternative for people to use instead of your new and improved pay-for version, you're not going to sell as much.
So I'm assuming it's a coincidence this story about releasing "abandoned" products was posted by timothy right after the "Nokia Outsources Symbian OS Work" story right? Wishful thinking? ;)
using System.Awesome;
I think there is some room here for forced hostile takeovers. Say an open source consortium forms and a pool is created to buy a company and release its code.
Forget old and failed stuff. I think the first target should be quickbooks.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I think the only way to find out would be to see if Deep Blue would make the same move again, and what the code looked like that would prompt it to do so.
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.
The reason these companies will never open-source even their 'failures' is because the greed is so consuming that they will squat on the IP of even the failed projects hoping to some day milk some extra cash from it.
Case in point: the 1990s DOS game Ascendancy. It was developed by a tiny outfit named The Logic Factory; not at all Big Corporate Business even. Its source has never been released. A sequel was promised for over a decade (Duke Nukem Forever, anyone?), though it never materialized. The game eventually found its way to abandonware sites, but recently they were served with C&D notices. Why? Because the original developers, after some FIFTEEN YEARS (remember, this was a DOS game), had dusted off the thing and ported it to the iPhone/iWhatever and wanted to again 'protect' their precious IP.
So this IP squatting isn't corporate behavior, it's human behavior. It's selfish or tribalistic greed.
n/t
The reason a lot of these things will never be open sourced is simply because the technology is still economically viable, and will be used for other things, even if the PRODUCT involved isn't. The AIBOs and Deep Blues of the world aren't the "endgame", they're a way of getting the tires on a given technology to be kicked for a bit.
open Mac OS 9 and os/2
Allow me to introduce you to the elephant in the corner that is owned by IBM - OS/2 Warp. Remember that? You know, the 32bit GUI OS that ran windows applications faster and more securely than the version of windows that was available at the same time?
I think I just came across another ATM recently that was running a specialized version of Warp; so I guess we can't call it completely dead yet, even though IBM won't sell it for any amount of money.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
wouldn't have helped microsoft bob.
So if a software product is killed off, and the code made available for everyone (not just the good guys) to inspect, who pays the cost of patching any security vulnerabilities that are found as a result?
It's not that the holes weren't there before (you never know, they may *be* the reason the product got canned), just that until it was handed to the world on a plate, there were easier vulnerbilities in other products to exploit. I have to say that if I had a company that used a product which was subsequently hacked after its source was released, I'd have a stampede of lawyers headed right for the door of the people who released that code.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
yeah!
Seriously - if a company no longer supports a product that still has a fairly large market, a lot of (particularly north-american) people will just throw the product in the garbage. Look at the billions of __WORKING__ cellular phones that end up in landfills. If users were given the freedom to improve the firmware on these aging products and make them relevent and useful again, we could give those devices away for free to people in the world who need them, or resell them.
It's better than waiting 1 million years for something to decompose in a landfill.
The people in control of this code are living in a outdated and dismal delusion.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Open source it, and when someone makes it work, hire them. They probably completed it as a hobby when your team of salaried engineers in million-dollar labs couldn't hack it.
But no, can't risk someone embarrassing us by making it work. If we can't profit from it, nobody can have it.
Microsoft Bob. Or the Clippie.
Like Competition...
Look at Blender for example. It has became a MAJOR contender in the 3d space. the last release has taken steps that are starting to pass horribly overpriced commercial products like Maya.
The hair and smoke simulations in Blender are just short of magical. and it's constantly getting better.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Windows 7 is a bit better, but not by much. So if XP was opened and available for free, I guess many people would stick to it. Hardware vendors might bundle it by default, to avoid paying for Windows 7. In short, it would really hurt Microsoft's Windows 7 business.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Dead versions of unix for dead hardware.
Yeah, like there arenâ(TM)t enough dead open source projects out there already. You may not like that comment but it's an undeniable truth.
So let's say I work for a company that has software used by a few fairly large financial institutions and my company wants to kill that software in favor of something..."else". The net result is that the customers are under heavy pressure to purchase the "else", and I'm going to be out of a job. Can I plant some open source libraries or source code into the product, sit back for a while, then demand the company release the rest of the product as open source?
At a minimum, I'd like to have the access to IRIX's software management subsystem source code, inst(1M) and roboinst(1M).
It's a shame that such advanced technology is bit-rotting away on some tape...
Please, please open source IRIX!
I like the interface.
Symbian was released under the EPL (which was later changed to a mostly-closed license) in 2010.
Full source code dump is available here and some other stuff are available here.
Look at Blender for example. It has became a MAJOR contender in the 3d space. the last release has taken steps that are starting to pass horribly overpriced commercial products like Maya.
And by major contender you mean it's still used by almost no one in the game or movie industry, right?
Please, now that my HP-15C has stopped working the handy software version that was once available as an X-window application under HP/UX about 10 years ago would be wonderful to get.
after say an 8 or 10 year exclusion period, say. But if I had to pick one, it'd be Voyager.
Unfortunately, it can take a fair amount of work to properly open source a large commercial project. The commercial project may well have bits of code and other assets from various sources under various restrictive licenses and either permission would need to be obtained (which makes work for the legal department) or documentation for the restricted code would need to be written so that somebody in the company or a volunteer could do a clean-room rewrite. And even if there is in fact no such code or asset in the project, I assume due diligence would require someone at the company to go through the project carefully to make sure that they have the right to release all of it. Plus, even after all that was done, there may be issues with required proprietary build tools--though that issue could be left for the community to work around (one can release a tarball that doesn't compile and let someone try to figure it out)--and, as many people mentioned, there may be issues with patents. Last year, I tracked down and persuaded the author of the now defunct but excellent PalmOS astronomy app 2sky to release it under the GPL. But open sourcing it wasn't easy, even though this was a much smaller project than some of the ones mentioned. There were a large number of chunks of code to be rewritten because the author had obtained them under a GPL-incompatible license. And for me to be able to generate binaries and debug, I had to switch it to an open source toolchain from Codewarrior. And finally I had to reverse-engineer some of the author's database formats because he couldn't track down the documentation for them and the data needed to be updated (new daylight-savings rules, new comet data). It all works now (open2sky.sf.net), but it was more work than I expected. The point is that to open source a large project is more work than inserting GPL notices and tarring. A company needs to make sure that everything they can't open source has been removed, and they may feel reasonably hesitant about releasing an obsolete project that doesn't successfully build. I still wish they would release. :-)
As the software curator at the Computer History Museum, the compromise that works most often is releasing
code for non-commercial use. From a software preservation standpoint, it does put it in an institutional
environment where the code can be saved and studied in the future. The most recent agreement is with PARC
releasing the code for the Xerox Alto.
Companies are in the business of making money. If they can't make money from it, no one else can have it.
Case in point MAME. MAME lets you play old arcade games (along with old console games). Some of the games haven't been available for decades and still companies like ATARI go after websites providing MAME downloads. Why? Because they have a HUGE stick up their @ss about someone else using their property.
Companies exist to make money, what's the business case for open sourcing your failed products? Quite apart from all the other issues with proprietary pieces of technology that you might still be using, the fact that you might yourself resurrect a project if the market for it changes, and the fact you'd rather you competitors keep guessing about exactly how advanced you are.
All crypto products should obviously be open source, that'd cover many VPN solutions. Wuala should be open source for the same reason.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
There's a lot of real old abandonware that I would like to see put out as OS, "ColorStudio" etc...
I used to work at an ecommerce startup in the '90s. We had an award winning retail product, and a single-shopping-cart online mall. Stores in the mall were generated by the retail product (or in-house for special (read: idiot) customers). We were purchased, and the new owners immediately canceled development of the retail product and stopped selling it. 18 months later, after the mall floundered, we were closed down. Duh.
The small team of developers, designers, and managers that were responsible for the retail product went to the new owners and tried to get the product, assuming all tech support, bugfixing, etc., responsibilities (and taking 10,000 copies off their hands which were burning money in a storage facility). We suggested a straight sale, licensing, open source, just give it to us because it's our baby, everything. There were close to 50,000 copies in use.
We were told that we could never get what we wanted because "It would look bad to the shareholders." Oh yeah. I'm sure the shareholders were psyched when they spent $45M of their money on a company they didn't understand, couldn't integrate, and eventually killed.
Every day I find more evidence that this is not the planet I picked to be born on.
bizniz is in bizniz to make money not give it away
This has been a particular chorus in the world of computer games.
Quite literally, the code for some games is sitting forgotten in a drawer somewhere, "property" that will never - ever - be exploited. It's too old to be of any use whatsoever for commercial products, while there is a niche of old-time gamers who would love to port/rewrite/develop it for opensource use. But no, someone "owns" it, and can't give up the idea of squeezing that long-dried-out teat for a few more drops of wealth.
For example, the ancient CRPG Darklands.
For a more modern game, I fear for AoC: as a game, at least for the first year, it sucked rocks. But I appreciated the amazing amount of work they'd done building REH's world. Perhaps free-to-play will save it and at least pay the bills, but if it did go dark , I'd desperately hope that the world-as-data would be made available for SOMEONE to use in the future.
-Styopa
If You're Going To Kill It, Open Source It, because it's almost the same!
Some products, like Ford's Edsel, failed for a reason and it wouldn't make sense to give it away.
Voting machines and remote controlled garage door openers
What society needs is a brainwave analyzer and a dream counter, so dreams can be taxed and lost productivity converted to money
No, it's much worse than that. While you are daydreaming you are not consuming entertainment. Daydreaming is worse than piracy, because pirates at least may work as advertisement, an honest consumer may end up buying the product he sees at his pirate friend's house.
Daydreaming should be outlawed, along with singing, whistling, or humming songs.
When IBM killed OS/2 there was tremendous pressure for the company to open source the operating system. At the time, the vast majority of the banking industry ATM machines ran on OS/2. After doing some analysis IBM concluded they simply could not open source the operating system. Not because they didn't want to but because of all the 3rd party licensed technology embedded in the system that IBM did not own. Without agreements from these 3rd parties IBM concluded it was not a legal option for them to publish the source code. Even today there is pressure on IBM to open source OS/2. Conversely, one could also concluded the company has no upside to open sourcing. It would take a tremendous amount of legal and technical experience, time, and money to get all the agreements in place to put such a system in the open source domain. I would argue this would be a great treasure for researchers as well as computer scientists as well as corporate customers but IBM has different ideas. Likewise, other complex systems also are bound to many different patent and 3rd party agreements as well as internal propensity to keep secrets in house. http://www.os2world.com/content/view/16595/1/
Some time ago, the Computer History Museum helped make the source code to MacPaint and QuickDraw available to the public.
Specific to something like Flip ... part of the reason Cisco killed it instead of selling it was to retain the patents and intellectual property for on-going and future products. That includes FlipShare (in fact, FlipShare is probably one of the main IPs they want to salvage in some form). Open Sourcing under those circumstances makes no sense.
I've been part of a company that did OS their products after they folded (Cobalt ... Sun acquired us then when they shut us down they allowed it to go OS). It works great in some situations. Cobalt lives on in many service providers, allowing existing and new Cobalt UI users to continue to do so, while not becoming any form of competition to Sun.
It can work in specific situations, but not in most.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
This was the same excuse/reason HP gave for not open-sourcing OpenMail. Bruce Perens was involved in the product and I think instrumental in at least getting HP to consider opening it. But too many licensing issues killed any chances of open-sourcing it. Damn shame too.
I know several people who would dearly love to grep the source code of some closed source products to look for their misappropriated IP.
Have gnu, will travel.
You know what I want open-sourced? Old video games. Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Ecco, Sim City 2000, Starcraft, etc.
The publishers can remove all the artwork for so that they don't step on their own trademarks for all I care. Those games all deserve to live forever, independent of the hardware they require.
I want Sim City 2000 native on Windows and Linux, I want Starcraft that runs natively on big screens, I want Zelda for my PC and a level editor to go with it.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Of course this criticism is coming from someone that never used it or does anything at all in 3D.
Come on man, stop making crap up, have you even looked at blender recently or are you being a nice parrot?
Lumpy is spot on, Blender at the last release is fantastic. Prove me wrong, post links to your work. Blender.org has tons of examples on how it's HIGHLY useable and produces pixar like output.
This, I think, is the main problem. Companies are afraid of having to compete with their own old products.
Uhh, I'm afraid that you are dreaming, more than anyone else here. How 'bout a guick list of the comanies most likely to form such a consortium, who actually have the money to do forced hostile takeovers?
One word:
Kickstarter
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Isn't that what Sony basically did when they invented VHS but decided to go with beta because it was a better design. And you see were that got them.
I know that they would never open source this but I'd love to see a tear down of the Scientologist e-meter
The two big problems being with this lovely idea are:
* Companies might not want to compete with prior version of their products
* Rights to the product might not be in the free and clear (legal)
Otherwise I too would love the to have PCG.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
It plugged right into your Mac or PC. It made a game of teaching chords, timing and reading music. It allowed you to do recitals and graded you on them. It was freakin' wonderful .
Let me at the source code. I'll get it working again.
I'd love to have the firmware to my Intel MB that they're not updating anymore, even though they know it is buggy; the latest version broke stuff that worked in the previous version but fixed other bugs from that version, so you have to pick your poison.
The other thing is drivers for hardware. If you're not going to update your buggy, crappy drivers, let us do it.
Open sourcing hardware is a very difficult process than open sourcing a software. Period.
Free Macromedia FreeHand!
All or most of the IP for Sony Entertainment Robot America (SERA)....was sold to Toyota unless something has changed since 2007 or so.
Last I heard, Toyota was using a bunch of the AI for at least one automotive project that involved a car "sensing" and reacting to your driving habits and possibly guessing what "mood" you were in. Apparently there was a related project involving that funny Segway/Wheelchair thing a few years ago as well, and small personal "pod" type cars that all interact with eachother.
The bottom line being, that the IP was not "abandoned"...but rather sold and is alive somewhere else
"Open sourcing" a project may indeed be a good way to kill it...
"If You're Going To Kill It, Open Source It"
then
"Nokia Outsources Symbian OS Work"
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
Of course this criticism is coming from someone that never used it or does anything at all in 3D.
Way to not understand what he said.
It's entirely possible for an open source app like Blender to simultaneously be good enough that it delights its mostly amateur userbase, and be totally unsuitable for the needs of pros, particularly those found in large organizations which don't blink at the cost of applications like Maya. Often that unsuitability has little to do with the feature list or usability of the product itself.
(You know, the whole "Who ya gonna call?" issue. Support matters. The ability to cross someone's palm with money and have a predictable schedule to the delivery of the new feature you're paying money for matters. So on and so forth. Open source is great at some things, but tends to be not quite so great at that sort of thing.)
If your company uses 3rd party software, you want it to be from either a big behemoth company or an open source project. The big behemoths will be around and will offer some support or they will notify you of the support going away, in a timely manner.
Open source projects stay around forever. Even if no development ever happens again you can get the software, the code and there is probably a web board some place for asking questions.
I worked for a company that went 3rd party with small shops that folded up, leaving them with projects they had to maintain for years, in dead technology locked away in someone's drawer.
Instead of learning their lesson they just decided to make everything they could in-house. Another dumb move. Instead of being able to hire people who instantly know how to use their frameworks, they now have to pay money and lost time in learning curves for a number of pieces of software.
You know, once in awhile you get some open source software, and it's like ... oh God, amazing, why/how did this get open sourced? I think it's to just stick a thumb in the eye of the competitors or something.
An example is Apache Cassandra. I cannot believe Facebook open sourced that, it's a ripoff of Google and Amazon's designs for scalable storage, and they just said - hm, this works real nice, open source it!
I feel like a deck hand who just got handed the ship's wheel or something - seriously amazing. There needs to be more of these kinds of "gifts to humanity" types of releases from the big corporations because it really could make the world a better place.
Sony responded to Make's suggestion by sending a team of lawyers over for some light pistol-whipping.
Vista.
personally, i think to be covered by copyright, said content should have to be made available. if you're not going to sell it, then i couldn't possibly be taking away anyone's money by getting it free from the internet. nothing digital should EVER go out of print, or worse, some back-in-the-vault marketing bullshit. you know, making the artificially scarce even more falsely scarce.
...
IMNAL, but I am unaware of any obligation under copyright law related to open sourcing the material. It only restricts the use of material which has already been made public.
If, however, you are referring to the fact that copyright law keeps getting extended, it is the process by which the law is made and modified that is the problem. Blindly complaining about wrong thing only confounds the problem by spreading FUD and distracting those who might organize to do something about the right thing.
I like that idea. All old and unused projects make them opensource. They can also make a license in which forbids on ways that makes profit illegal on the code.