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Lego Allowing Open-Source OS
JAZ writes "Forbes has an article on
on Lego Mindstorms and the independent Open Source (MPL) LegOS and how Lego is not trying to stop it (obviously Lego is NOT an American Corp=]) It seems that sharing Intellectual Property can actually help sales... who'da thunk it "
A couple of thoughts on this:
1) I've been pretty active with LegOS for quite some time. It is not new; rather, it is nearly a year old and has been under active development for most of this time. There already are several developers- not more than 3 or 4, really, but enough to keep this type of project going.
Kekoa has done almost all of the grunt work on the HW end, and from that Markus and a couple of others took care of basically all of the code. From there, it has basically already taken on a life of it's own- there is a cross-platform emulator helpful for code debugging, substantial documentation (to toot my own horn) and it is being used in other projects (as the base for a networking project and a projected JVM.)
2) It will never be like Mozilla, not just because the people working on it are not employed by LegOS, but because the complete system is ~10K lines of code. That means that slackers like me can actually read, understand, and even once in a blue moon fix the code- unlike Mozilla, which, while a great project, has a ridiculous learning curve.
-luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Actually this kind of sueing makes a lot of sense. A company can effectively lose a trademark if it becomes "common vocabulary" that in normal speech has a general meaning.
You can maintain trademark without suing, just make a contractual agreement with the other people using the name, specifying how they need to identify the trademark, that they need to identify themselves as clearly not part of the Lego corporation, etc. More companies need to think about doing this rather than throwing lawyers at people, since it can potentially help profits to do so.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I saved my metal erector-set for my son, he is 6 now and isn't very interested. They have a plactic "equivalent" called K'nex that he is really into. He builds some neat stuff, and the parts are a lot lighter and flexible than the old metal kits. It goes together a lot faster than the metal nuts and bolts. He can put together a huge crane in an afternoon where I would have taken the better part of a week to make the same size thing if I had even had enough parts back then.
:-) ) still love playing with them together.
I too was kind of resistant to the 'tinker toys' sets that are made of plastic. But I have to admit, my kids do a lot of neat stuff with them that we could never have done with the wood ones (the bendable plastic rods open up a whole new dimension.
The only thing I don't really care for is the proliferation of the Lego theme-kits (although I love the star wars stuff). The effect this seems to have is that the kids want the next set so they can make whatever the kit is designed for (space vehicles, pirate sips, subs)instead of using generic parts they already have and using their imagination to make something original.
Then the parts get all mixed together and they get real frustrated when they pull out the plans and try to rebuild a specific kit. But, still a cool toy and my kids (and I
Since the article is pretty short on details, I thought I'd throw out some notes:
/. by Russ Nelson. :) Also very useful for debugging.
1) The Lego uses a Hitachi H8-300 chip, which is a target for gcc, so compiling code for the chip is merely a matter of rebuilding gcc as a cross-compiler.
2) Strictly speaking, LegOS is not an OS but a library, which you compile along with your actual code to give you OS-like features: threading, time management, etc. It also frees you from lego's arbitrary limit on variables (only 32! with no data structures! eww...) and other such problems.
Umm... that's all the geek info I can think of off the top of my head. URLs:
The Official LegOS homepage.
LUGNET, which is a discussion area for all types of lego stuff. the robotics list there serves as the main discussion area for LegOS development and use.
The Internals page. Already mentioned here on
EmuLegOS. An emulator for LegOS. Gives you a yellow box on your screen, just as if you owned a Lego brick yourself
My HOWTO. More or less the official documentation. Enjoy.
Good luck- help Lego back into the black-
luge
IAAL,BIANLY
--
If O'Reilly writes a Lego book, what animal will they use for the cover? Maybe the dragon from one of the Lego fantasy sets? I'd love to read the colophon from the back of the book...
"The animal on the cover is a small plastic dragon (Draco draco var. injectus moldii). Habitat includes the area under sofas and sock piles."
Why doesn't anyone make a case for PC's out of LegoS? I've seen the MAc ones before...
Your mammas flamebait.
I just got myself a Mindstorms kit last week. There is no way in smurf I would have bought it had LegOS not been available. I own a Mac, and the silly software that comes with it won't run, not to mention how unprogrammable it is. Give me C++ over some graphical programming any day.
To Lego: You got a $200 sale to me precisely because you have allowed this to happen.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Eureka! The solution to NASA's budget problems:
Use Legos to build the International Space Station! It doesn't get more modular than Legos.
And even better, you're much less likely to step on one of the suckers in zero G.
Programmable lego is cool. X10 home automation is cool. Combine the two... wow.
lego has absoloutely nothing to lose by the OSS lego thing, since they don't sell software, they sell physical hardware. Even if someone has open-source lego software which lego got no money for, they still have to pay lego money for, well, legos.
Since the software is useless without the hardware (which is what costs money anwyay), why would Lego care that the software is freely available? They aren't losing anything.
It's kind of like the whole Palmpilot emulator thing. Palm doesn't try to stop emulation-- in fact they _help_ the emulators, supplying roms and stuff-- because without the hardware the software has no use.
So don't assume lego is some benevolent company helping open source. If they were somehow losing money, they'd be fighting as dirty as Nintendo is.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Lego Mindstorms Reverse-Engineering. Go. Download. Be happy.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Lego isn't making money off the Mindstorms programming language and interface. They'll selling the hardware (and just packaging everything necessary to access that hardware along with it). It's not as if Lego separates the two. An open-source Lego OS isn't going to hurt them at all. People will still need to buy Mindstorms to be able to use it. At least they recognize the fact that an open-source project might actually /make/ them money, unlike some /Japanese/ firms who won't let emulators out there hit the market.
"A piece of Lego"
"I have a lot of Lego"
"I have built a robot out of Lego"
One could argue that I'm only saying this because I'm British (Where the plural of 'A Lego brick' is always* 'Lego'), but I do actaully have some justification - from the rec.toys.lego FAQ:
I see it as much like sand - you'd say
"A grain of sand" vs "A sand"
"I have a lot of sand" vs "I have a lot of sands"
"I have built a castle out of sand" vs "I have built a castle out of sands"
Pedantic, I know - but it just always sounds so wrong when people refer to them as "Legos"...
cheers,
Tim
They've also got some Star Wars expansion stuff not mentioned in the article. Imagine a relatively intelligent R2 unit wandering around... Hmm, I need to look more at the specs for this thing: voice synthesization would be cool. Mouse droids, here I come...
This is a definite must-have for any hardware-tinkering geek.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
Yes, but how old does she have to be to handle an errector set? I was nearly done with high school by the time I had one.
And why aren't they interested in lego? THough one loves those horrid new-fangled, over-sized, plastic tinker toys . . .
I have a devil of a time finding the plain, simple, stuff that is the base of a solid lego collection. Of the three cubic feet or so of lego from my childhood (still with my parents), the majority is plain, simple, blocks.
The basic "build what you want" sets (remember the semi-opaque plastic trays?) seem to be long gone, as well as the sets of specialty parts (axles, bevelled roof pieces, etc.). When the pieces exist, they're part of a larger set to build something specific. For that matter, almost everything available now is a set to build somehting specific, with specialized pieces. And where are the blue train tracks?
So far, I'm having better luck with Megablocks (?)--and my daughters seem to prefer their pastel colors, too.
Never mind the fancy doo-dads. Sell me about 20 lbs of 2x4 blocks, 2 lbs of 4x4, and about 5 lbs of miscellaneous other blocks. THen I'll be happy to add the odds & ends.
It sounds like LEGO will be releasing a driver development kit that is more helpful to people working in alternate languages etc. From the FAQ:
Will LEGO MINDSTORMS release a Software Developer's Kit?
We have released a Software Developer's Kit (SDK), which includes a license to utilize the underlying
technology for the LEGO MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System 1.0. The SDK has documentation to enable
advanced users to write commands to the RCX from alternative programming environments, such as Visual Basic.
This documentation provides much greater access to the full range of commands and functions built inside the
RCX.
The first release of the SDK focuses on communicating with the RCX from Windows applications, as the current
drivers are designed for this environment.
Steps are being taken now to revise the architecture of the drivers to be much more platform independent.
This will give users more options for leveraging the power of the RCX. Once the new drivers have been
developed and tested, we will release a revised and more powerful SDK. We expect the second SDK to be
released in 1999.
Use of the SDK and the underlying technology is strictly under the terms of the SDK licensing agreement and
is only for noncommercial use. The LEGO Group retains all rights to the product and the underlying
technology.
Anyone interested in learning as much as possible about LegOS is invited to check out the LegOS newsgroup on LUGNET:
http://www.lugnet.com/robotics/rcx/legos/
The group is readable via the web, via a real NNTP newsreader, and also via email as a mailing list.
--Todd
Heh, this is one of the great pleasures in being a parent. I can buy my son all the cool toys I don't have any more like Lego and spend "quality time" with him playing. :-)
Here's a canned search resulting in bits of archived info on the ORA book, from focused discussion forums about LEGO robotics.
--Todd