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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."
Except that without the rights to redistribute that code, you're advocating copyright infringement.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Incorrect.
You forget the moment in 2008 when Sony paid Warner Brothers a metric shit-ton of cash to go Blu-Ray Exclusive.
Before that moment, HD-DVD was outselling Blu-Ray. It was really that simple.
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. :-)
The link I meant to post was this: http://www.betanews.com/article/Bluray-Disc-Sales-Surpass-HD-DVD/1172267610
Here is another link:
Blu-ray outsold HD DVD by a nearly 2-to-1 margin for the first nine months of the year, selling 2.6 million units to HD DVD’s 1.4 million.
Again, this story was like 8 months before Warner switched. Sorry, but your post is historical revisionism nonsense.