Erwin Rol: >> What I don't really understand is how you go *poof* out of the market >> when you sell gadgets that need a open source driver ? People still >> would have to by the gadget, wouldn't they ? Andy Green: > The worry is that when much of what makes the gadget innovative is tied > up in the code that must be opened, people will indeed still buy the > gadget, but perhaps not from the original author of the opened code... > lots of people with financial interests in such projects become highly > agitated and concerned when told they must give the sources with the > product, although that seems to be gradually going away as we see more > and more embedded GPL stuff and so far little or no destruction from it. Nothing new with this. How many different brands of radio can you buy in a shop? Many are copies of others, in concept at least. Whatever you can make, so can someone else; you've just got to make a better product, all round. Or is your television the same brand as the first one ever designed, your radio, your phone, and so on... Most electronic parts are common, so it's easy enough to open up a gadget and duplicate it. Whether it's worth the effort to directly copy someone else's engineering is another matter. Occasionally I see manufacturers gouging out identifying marks on components. I hate this, it makes service next to impossible. They want you to buy $1 components from them with a $50 price, and they only keep them available for a couple of years. If I buy something from someone, I buy what they've built, the product. That's what they sell us, something prebuilt. It's a bit rich to say they us consumers have no right to know how it works. If I decide to crack it open and modify it, I will. If I decide to crack it open and do something similar in something I'm going to use around home or work, I will. I'm sure not going to go around selling something copied that way, though. When you make everything closed (electronics, software, etc.), you kill off the next generation of experimenters who pull things apart to find out how they work, and build better versions. Few kids getting into computers these days actually have an interest in "computing," they just want a magic trick box. Likewise with electronics, they don't build a radio or stereo amplifier, they just hunt around for prebuilt modules. -- Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
