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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">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.<br>
<br>
Here is what (at an engineering level) made a lot of trouble at
Bug (IMHO, not an official view):<br>
- 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.
<br>
<br>
- 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. <br>
<br>
- 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.<br>
<br>
- 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get them stable and out 3 years later, they are so outdated it's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.<br>
<br>
- Delay: The open phone tech will always be 6 to 24 months behind
the advertised *buy now, we ship next month* phones. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
IMHO The game-changer in the rise of Open Hardware is going to be:<br>
- Moore's law slowing down (+) <br>
- Retired Baby Boomer engineers getting into less-profit-driven
positions as they retire (+) <br>
- Patent trolls focusing on hardware more (-)<br>
- Competition from China driving Americans companies to be more
collaborative, and doing that collab open (+)<br>
- Price concerns driving Americans companies to be more
collaborative, and doing that collab open (+)<br>
- 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.<br>
<br>
<br>
hack on,<br>
- Far McKon<br>
<br>
<br>
On 11/29/13 4:04 AM, Marketply wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:1165113282.444110.1385715857969.open-xchange@email.1and1.com"
type="cite">
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charset=ISO-8859-1">
<div> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2013/about_page">Google
Summer of Code</a> 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. </div>
<div> </div>
<div> Android has helped to get open source operating systems into
people's hands (and smart handhelds) globally. </div>
<div> </div>
<div> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://motorola-blog.blogspot.com/2013/10/goodbye-sticky-hello-ara.html">Project
Ara</a> could similarly help propel the global reach of the
open source hardware movement: </div>
<div> </div>
<div> <em>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.</em> </div>
<div> </div>
<div> Aside: the next logical progression could be a Motorola
Summer of Hardware. </div>
<div> </div>
<div> How do you feel about this and who else do you see as a game
changer for the rise of open source hardware? </div>
<div> </div>
<div id="ox-signature"> Marino Hernandez <br>
(just a founder of <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.marketply.org">Marketply</a>) <br>
203-429-4205 </div>
<br>
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