This is an excellent idea, though not an easy one to execute. Let me bring up a few advantages and my major concern.
There are several advantages of setting up a non-profit organization as a gateway for giving to the OSS community. First, it lowers the hurdle to giving for those who don't have the time or energy to figure out all the legal and financial details, tax implications, etc. The postings above make it pretty clear that there's a lot to consider: finding a real need, ensuring that your gift has real impact, understanding the tax implications for you and for the beneficiaries, and so on. A Foundation would know about all these issues and would take care of them.
Second, at least for donors in the US, a foundation would take care of the tax implicitions for donors: donations to non-profits with 401(c)3 status are tax-deductible and very easy to figure into your income taxes.
Creating a foundation would make a contribution to the OSS community as easy as writing a check to The Open Source Foundation. Thus, we could expect many more people to contribute financially.
The difficult thing is making it actually work, convincing people that the money is going to the right places, and keeping the cost of organizational overhead down. I believe the best way to ease these concerns would be to start by getting commitments from several OSS community leaders to be board members of the Foundation. Folks like Linus, Larry Wall, and Tim O'Reilly would review grant applications once or twice a year, and select beneficiaries.
I suspect that lots of nouveau riche geeks would be inclined to support the OSS Foundation, even if they didn't make their money from the Red Hat IPO. This is a great idea!
There are many physical similarities between the Yopy and CE handhelds: the size of the display (320x240), 4-way rocker switch on the front, the scroll-wheel on the side with action/record buttons. I even remember seeing a device before that had the backlight switch at the top of the display, just like the Yopy. The only thing I can't account for is the StrongARM CPU: there _is_ a port of CE to the StrongARM, but I can't find any Palm-sized devices that used it. (HP does have HPCs based on SA, e.g. the Jornada 820.)
Note that Philips discontinued their palm-sized WinCE devices a while ago. Is it possible that they sold the design to Samsung...?
I'd love it if companies were legally required to release the source of any product that's been discontinued--including in the event of the demise of the company.
It's hard to imagine how you would make this stick legally: it's easy for a company to claim "no really, it's not discontinued, we still have 1/10th of a developer working on this, it'll be done in 5 or 6 years." Then there's all the issues with intellectual property rights entangled in the source. I wonder, though, if you could craft a law along the lines of the Freedom of Information Act, requiring source code to be released at a certain point in time. (It'd be the Freedom of Source Code Act--FOSCA) It would give interested parties a basis to sue the holder of the code for release. This would work in particular in situations where a company gets acquired and one of its products is squelched by the new owners.
Alternatively, it might be possible to accomplish this with a culture shift: if developers regularly required as part of their employment contracts a clause that the product code be released under certain circumstances. We can all think of tons of cases where developers labored for years on supercool a product, only to have the startup go under and the code disappear into a legal black hole.
I'm not inclined to take this action by Amazon as a general indicator that they'll actively protect all their patents against all competition. Here's why: Barnesandnoble.com have imitated Amazon at every step of their evolution. After a lousy original design, the B&N.com site was redesigned in their v2 to be a complete Amazon rip-off in look and feel. [I haven't visited lately so this may have changed in the last year.] Amazon may feel that B&N have been imitating their success long enough, riding on the coattails of Amazon's trial and error process to make e-commerce work; this patent was a good chance to push back a bit. Time will tell whether Amazon is going to enforce it against others as well.
Another thought: while B&N are allied with Microsoft, Amazon widely deploys open-source software on their site. Amazon may well be a future source of code contributions to those projects; it may in the community's interests to court Amazon.
MS Research has work in this area as well. The Task Gallery prototype makes very conservative use of 3D: runs on a desktop machine, driven with a regular mouse. No goggles, head-mounted displays, etc.--clearly aimed at a low barrier to adoption (or lowest common denominator, if you prefer.) The functionality is much like a virtual window manager for X, just with a very different UI metaphor. It's early prototyping work--not aimed at shipping in a product in the short term.
The interesting thing, though, is that the MSR prototype hosts almost any (unmodified) Windows application inside the 3D environment--and that apps can be redirected into the environment on an individual basis. Other efforts to run X apps in a 3D environment (such as those at Chalmers Univ in Sweden) have generally created virtual display devices and done whole-desktop redirection.
No, you don't want to do your coding in this environment--but then that's not what it was designed for. :-)
This is a 1600x1024 display selling for $4000. SGI has had one of these out for a while now, selling around $2500. It's called the 1600SW flatpanel. So far only works with a NumberNine video card that's not great for 3D, but hey.. if you have $2500 to burn, just use it as your second display.:-)
See the SGI Flatpanel page , and check out places like shopper.com for the best price deal.
I asked a friend who works fulltime with high-tech non-profits; here's what she said:
Volunteer! Starting a nonprofit is like starting a busines -- you have to know your market first. It's a lot of work and money and not something to jump into too quickly. Volunteer first to not only share expertise, but also learn about needs and existing programs. He's right, not much going on in Salt Lake City. He should contact CompuMentor - www.compumentor.org - based in San Fran but does excellent volunteer matching all over and is a great resource in general. Also, contact your local United Way. No one knows the nonprofit and volunteer community better than the United Ways. If schools are your thing, maybe contact the school district to see if there are interesting volunteer programs that may suit your interests.
MS Research showed a 3D UI prototype called the Task Gallery at the WinHEC conference in April, running live & working Windows apps inside a 3D environment. They're betting on bringing the legacy apps along and then augmenting the environment with new uses for 3D. Nothing public yet on the MS Research website, but it was featured in a big figure in the Wall Street Journal's special feature on managing information overload last week. ("Managing the Mountain")
Slashdot Mirror
This is an excellent idea, though not an easy one to execute. Let me bring up a few advantages and my major concern.
There are several advantages of setting up a non-profit organization as a gateway for giving to the OSS community. First, it lowers the hurdle to giving for those who don't have the time or energy to figure out all the legal and financial details, tax implications, etc. The postings above make it pretty clear that there's a lot to consider: finding a real need, ensuring that your gift has real impact, understanding the tax implications for you and for the beneficiaries, and so on. A Foundation would know about all these issues and would take care of them.
Second, at least for donors in the US, a foundation would take care of the tax implicitions for donors: donations to non-profits with 401(c)3 status are tax-deductible and very easy to figure into your income taxes.
Creating a foundation would make a contribution to the OSS community as easy as writing a check to The Open Source Foundation. Thus, we could expect many more people to contribute financially.
The difficult thing is making it actually work, convincing people that the money is going to the right places, and keeping the cost of organizational overhead down. I believe the best way to ease these concerns would be to start by getting commitments from several OSS community leaders to be board members of the Foundation. Folks like Linus, Larry Wall, and Tim O'Reilly would review grant applications once or twice a year, and select beneficiaries.
I suspect that lots of nouveau riche geeks would be inclined to support the OSS Foundation, even if they didn't make their money from the Red Hat IPO. This is a great idea!
There are many physical similarities between the Yopy and CE handhelds: the size of the display (320x240), 4-way rocker switch on the front, the scroll-wheel on the side with action/record buttons. I even remember seeing a device before that had the backlight switch at the top of the display, just like the Yopy. The only thing I can't account for is the StrongARM CPU: there _is_ a port of CE to the StrongARM, but I can't find any Palm-sized devices that used it. (HP does have HPCs based on SA, e.g. the Jornada 820.)
Note that Philips discontinued their palm-sized WinCE devices a while ago. Is it possible that they sold the design to Samsung...?
I'd love it if companies were legally required to release the source of any product that's been discontinued--including in the event of the demise of the company.
It's hard to imagine how you would make this stick legally: it's easy for a company to claim "no really, it's not discontinued, we still have 1/10th of a developer working on this, it'll be done in 5 or 6 years." Then there's all the issues with intellectual property rights entangled in the source. I wonder, though, if you could craft a law along the lines of the Freedom of Information Act, requiring source code to be released at a certain point in time. (It'd be the Freedom of Source Code Act--FOSCA) It would give interested parties a basis to sue the holder of the code for release. This would work in particular in situations where a company gets acquired and one of its products is squelched by the new owners.
Alternatively, it might be possible to accomplish this with a culture shift: if developers regularly required as part of their employment contracts a clause that the product code be released under certain circumstances. We can all think of tons of cases where developers labored for years on supercool a product, only to have the startup go under and the code disappear into a legal black hole.
I'm not inclined to take this action by Amazon as a general indicator that they'll actively protect all their patents against all competition. Here's why: Barnesandnoble.com have imitated Amazon at every step of their evolution. After a lousy original design, the B&N.com site was redesigned in their v2 to be a complete Amazon rip-off in look and feel. [I haven't visited lately so this may have changed in the last year.] Amazon may feel that B&N have been imitating their success long enough, riding on the coattails of Amazon's trial and error process to make e-commerce work; this patent was a good chance to push back a bit. Time will tell whether Amazon is going to enforce it against others as well.
Another thought: while B&N are allied with Microsoft, Amazon widely deploys open-source software on their site. Amazon may well be a future source of code contributions to those projects; it may in the community's interests to court Amazon.
MS Research has work in this area as well. The Task Gallery prototype makes very conservative use of 3D: runs on a desktop machine, driven with a regular mouse. No goggles, head-mounted displays, etc.--clearly aimed at a low barrier to adoption (or lowest common denominator, if you prefer.) The functionality is much like a virtual window manager for X, just with a very different UI metaphor. It's early prototyping work--not aimed at shipping in a product in the short term.
:-)
The interesting thing, though, is that the MSR prototype hosts almost any (unmodified) Windows application inside the 3D environment--and that apps can be redirected into the environment on an individual basis. Other efforts to run X apps in a 3D environment (such as those at Chalmers Univ in Sweden) have generally created virtual display devices and done whole-desktop redirection.
No, you don't want to do your coding in this environment--but then that's not what it was designed for.
see: The Task Gallery
This is a 1600x1024 display selling for $4000. SGI has had one of these out for a while now, selling around $2500. It's called the 1600SW flatpanel. So far only works with a NumberNine video card that's not great for 3D, but hey.. if you have $2500 to burn, just use it as your second display. :-)
See the SGI Flatpanel page , and check out places like shopper.com for the best price deal.
I asked a friend who works fulltime with high-tech non-profits; here's what she said:
Volunteer! Starting a nonprofit is like starting a busines -- you have to know your market first. It's a lot of work and money and not something to jump into too quickly. Volunteer first to not only share expertise, but also learn about needs and existing programs. He's right, not much going on in Salt Lake City. He should contact CompuMentor - www.compumentor.org - based in San Fran but does excellent volunteer matching all over and is a great resource in general. Also, contact your local United Way. No one knows the nonprofit and volunteer community better than the United Ways. If schools are your thing, maybe contact the school district to see if there are interesting volunteer programs that may suit your interests.
MS Research showed a 3D UI prototype called the Task Gallery at the WinHEC conference in April, running live & working Windows apps inside a 3D environment. They're betting on bringing the legacy apps along and then augmenting the environment with new uses for 3D. Nothing public yet on the MS Research website, but it was featured in a big figure in the Wall Street Journal's special feature on managing information overload last week. ("Managing the Mountain")