Re: New forum topic - Open Control
Feb 11, 2002 11:26 am, by Curt Wuollet
Text :
Hi Greg

This money thing is the easisest to answer. I'll be brief. You simply have to take a different approach.

> I would agree. People who use technology only want one thing from it. Does
> it work. The next thing they want is if it is broke where can I get a
> replacment. Forklifts do amazing things for our economy.
>
> Totally free, open system can fill niches but no one dedicates real R and D
> dollars to making something they may never own in the future. Imagine it
> from the venture capitalist's viewpoint.

That's assuming that R&D dollars buy you better brainpower. In many cases that researcher also writes OSS. Is the stuff he writes for money better? Is the stuff that Linus writes for Transmeta better than the stuff he writes for Linux? Great products take great people not great money. OSS has some of the best. And they're doing it because they _want_ to.

> I would like to take your money to make this very cool niche product that I
> will then give the rights away to the public. How am I going to pay you
> back? I'm not. I can't. No one has bought my idea from me.

I'm working out the details of truly Open Hardware. The needs are quite modest and the risk is much less than if I did a VC start up to do it. I'm not at all sure it would produce better results to have to answer to money people. On the contrary, spending _my_ money makes for great care and accountability. There isn't a lot of rocket science in this field. Edison said: "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" I hope he's right.

> Venture caps and Corporations with money hate backing up this stuff. It goes
> against everthing they were taught about in business school. The only way
> this gets any legs is if it is tagged to hardware sales. But then isn't that
> why we started this whole mess anyway?

So shouldn't we try something different? I don't think VCs would be killing each other to buy into the status quo either. Most of them are warts on the arse of hugely diversified corporations and hardly the bright spots on the annual report. Even with lock-in and pretty generous margins.

> What suffers the most are longterm big payoff ideas that have this type of
> ending. It took our government persuing a distributed information model to
> come up with TCPIP. That is the only invester I know that would underwrite
> large projects for the benifit of all.

It could be argued that the success has more to do with openness and public ownership than the seed money DARPA put up. Indeed the greatest public network the world has known was started with unpaid student labor. A class of folks remarkably similar to the Linux community. In fact, a lot of the same folks.

> Don't take me to far away though. I'm sick too of paying the vender
> manytimes over the original cost of the product. Membership fees...,
> maintenence fees..., buy the hardware and by the way you need to buy our
> software to make our hardware run...

Me too. I think I've got the skills and determination to do something about it. Well, the determination anyway :^)

> Open has been most effective when it is used as communication standard.
> MODBUS RTU/TCPIP, TCPIP, RS232, RS485, USB, Ethernet Etc. Published and then
> practiced.

Yes, it seems to have worked well in all areas where it has been seriously tried. Hmmmmm.

> Greg Schiller
> gregs@automatica.biz
> www.automatica.biz

Regards

cww
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