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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."
Opensource the Space Shuttle :)
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.
You have that already. Everyone - barring a glitch in the system - is issued two at birth. Usually they come with five "finger" add-on expansion units free of charge, too.
Now, it's up to you to supply your own ink, back up your data regularly, and take care of the daily maintenance to keep your Palms in good working order...
No, just a bunch of electronic yipping.
Actually, it was over 5 years ago that it happened.
Sony have just been jerkholes about people trying to continue to use and improve the toy they spent a buttload of money on since.
That should be the law..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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.
to deal with all the sacred cows the company had accumulated over the years.
So Sony is the corporate equivalent of a Mooby's? Wait... actually, that kinda makes sense.
But no, the reason he was hired was to be a distraction, really. Sony's real business model has always been to try to take over the standard so that everyone has to license from them.
Consider the following list:
Beta vs VHS -> Sony collected royalties for over two decades on Beta in the form of Betacam recording and the professional TV industry (where image quality did in fact matter more).
DAT vs standard audiotape vs CD Audio -> DAT was actually very popular in Europe and Asia for a good while. Licensing restrictions and "piracy worries" kept it mostly out of the US thanks to the MafiAA.
Minidisc vs CD Audio -> See DAT. Minidisc eventually came back for another, even more stupid round as the "UMD" they were pushing in the PSP.
ATRAC audio vs MP3 audio -> The reason nobody in their right mind would ever buy a Sony portable music player as compared to, say, a Nomad or iPod.
Sony MemoryStick vs SD Memory Sticks -> Sony keeps pushing out their own proprietary lines of gear. PSP and a host of cameras keep this line alive and it sells, despite being way overpriced compared to the SD Micro format.
Think about it. Why did the PS2 have a DVD drive? Sony was part of the DVD consortium. Why did the PS3 have a Blu-Ray drive? Same reason. Before the PS3 launched, HD-DVD was actually winning the format war despite Sony USA refusing to put out any of their movie catalog in the format.
That's the Sony business model. Try to win a "format war" in a way that everyone has to pay you royalties to license your format. Everything else is ancillary at best.
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.
I actually have no problem with this. They dusted off their IP and are using it again. If they were to leave it to languish and still sent out the C&D letters, then you would have a point of it being pointless.
IBM won't,
http://www.ecomstation.com/
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
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.
If you don't want to pay for one of the "gloves" that Moryath described, you can download packages off the internet (some of which are free) that, if used correctly, are said to cause a layer of insulating hair to grow on your Palm. Hwever, you may want to do this at home to avoid awkward conversations with supervisors. WARNING - If your screen starts to fade to black, stop immediately.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
Incorrect.
That's what you claim, but the actual evidence backs me up.
You forget the moment in 2008 when Sony paid Warner Brothers a metric shit-ton of cash to go Blu-Ray Exclusive.
I don't forget that at all. Doesn't change the fact that when Warner was releasing both formats that the Blu-Ray was consistently outselling the HD DVD version by wide magins. And by early 2007 Blu-Ray was already outselling HD DVD. There are a multitude of other stories from early 2007 through mid 2007 showing the same thing long before Warner went exclusive. By mid 2007 Blu-Ray was selling 2:1 over HD DVD.
Before that moment, HD-DVD was outselling Blu-Ray. It was really that simple.
Except by "that simple" you mean "simply false", right? You can try to reinvent history but a simple Google search is enough to show the historical evidence is against you.
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.
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/
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.
All crypto should be open source, but for different reasons. Schneier wrote on this a bit; unfortunately, I don't have the links at hand, but here are some quotes:
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