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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.
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"
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.
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.'"