[Discuss] Google the game changer?

[FarMcKon]

I love the idea, but I've been down that road once (I was a kernel/app
developer at Bug Labs) and while 'lego hardware' is a great concept,
it's impossible to make practical.

Here is what (at an engineering level) made a lot of trouble at Bug
(IMHO, not an official view):
 - To get people onboard, you really need 2-4 years of engineering
experience. It's not a 'get it for christmas' hobby.  The people that
will use and benefit from this are other R&D Departments.

 - The faster, hotter, and smarter you make electronics, the more
finicky they are.  A ****LOT*** of chips are hard to get happy and
stable if hand soldered by a pro. Making them a plug/unplug module (and
protections circuits to go with it)  and your failure rate explodes, or
your engineering effort expodes.

 - A lot of the protocols they are trying to use over these wires are
not built for plug/unplug. So most chips will need to have a
'translater' to get on a bus that can handle that spec, or you will need
to do a hell a lot of hack arounds to get those protocols working in a
plug/unplug environment.

- Cost. On My Christ, sourcing high-end chips (Broadcom GSM, low-power
wifi) is hard enough for medium sized firms. Sourcing them in hobby
quantity, and then ruggidizing them. By the time you get them stable and
out 3 years later, they are so outdated it's  sad.

- Delay: The open phone tech will always be 6 to 24 months behind the
advertised *buy now, we ship next month* phones. 

We've been down this road (Open Moko. Bug Labs, and more)**.  The 'fully
configurable' system is going to be crash-tastic.  It's great PR, it's
shit engineering. It's always amazing to watch computer science (and
some engineering disciplines) waste weeks or months of effort when 2
days of research (google, and calling experienced friends) could have
mapped out the problems space and either stopped the project, or avoided
the giant time-suck holes other people fell in.  

I have more hope for jolla, where the 'plugable' modules are
nice-to-have add-ons and external to the core system.  They are a bit
isolated, and they are not core components of operation.  It's much more
likely to succeed, and they can use isolation circuits and 'firewall'
the electronics at a few external point, instead of ruggidizing a lot of
internal connections.

IMHO The game-changer in the rise of Open Hardware is going to be:
 - Moore's law slowing down (+)
 - Retired Baby Boomer engineers getting into less-profit-driven
positions as they retire (+)
 - Patent trolls focusing on hardware more (-)
 - Competition from China driving Americans companies to be more
collaborative, and doing that collab open (+)
 - Price concerns driving Americans companies to be more collaborative,
and doing that collab open (+)
 - Internet of things drive + SDR:  Wireless technologies make it easier
to sniff and reverse-engineer internal protocols, meaning it will be
harder to lock folks out.  You just need an antenna, and compatible code
to hack something in the system. It lowers integration cost for legit
partners, as well as 3rd party add on's and hackers as well.


hack on,
- Far McKon


On 11/29/13 4:04 AM, Marketply wrote:
> Google Summer of Code
> <http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2013/about_page>
> pays students to write code for open source projects. Thus increasing
> the pool of people introduced to open source while at the same time
> improving the health of open source.
>  
> Android has helped to get open source operating systems into people's
> hands (and smart handhelds) globally.
>  
> Project Ara
> <http://motorola-blog.blogspot.com/2013/10/goodbye-sticky-hello-ara.html>
> could similarly help propel the global reach of the open source
> hardware movement:
>  
> /Project Ara is developing a free, open hardware platform for creating
> highly modular smartphones. We want to do for hardware what the
> Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party
> developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of
> innovation, and substantially compress development timelines./
>  
> Aside: the next logical progression could be a Motorola Summer of
> Hardware.
>  
> How do you feel about this and who else do you see as a game changer
> for the rise of open source hardware?
>  
> Marino Hernandez
> (just a founder of Marketply <http://www.marketply.org>)
> 203-429-4205
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> discuss mailing list
> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss

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