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Programming Handhelds Wireless Networking IT Technology Hardware

'Open Funding' For Driver Development 100

Posted by timothy from the how-about-kernel-drivers-for-usb-802.11 dept.
Doc Ruby writes "The TreoCentral community has announced a bounty for the first BlueTooth SDIO driver delivered for the Treo 600 (PalmOS 5). The thread shows the development of both the requirements of the quarry, and the contributions to the bounty. If this process works, is 'open funding' of development the next wave of the emerging online community? How will the 'traditional' vision/scope> requirements> features> >recode> retest> demo> cycle expand to include the user community in the financing?" Update: 06/16 19:43 GMT by T : Updated the bounty link to a server better able to handle it.
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'Open Funding' For Driver Development More

'Open Funding' For Driver Development

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  • Excellent Stuff! Future Development Model? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by william_lorenz ( 703263 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:37PM (#9444329) Homepage
    This is great! I certianly wish more companies would adopt this kind of a driver development model.

    I know the GNOME Foundation [gnome.org] has also done a similar bounty system [gnome.org], recently.

  • There's a time limit... (Score:3, Informative)

    by braindead ( 33893 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:37PM (#9444330)
    The bounty is only valid until September 6, 2004 - so let's get coding!
    • I'm not sure that's enough time... But get someone far enough in it and it will be released no matter if theres a bounty or not. But time will tell I guess.
    • I can't RTFA to see how much the bounty is (slashdot effect), but how much do you want to bet that nobody will collect? One month and a half to provide a driver for proprietary hardware isn't very long if you're working on it in spare time, and I honestly doubt that the bounty equates to a decent hourly rate. Why such a short timespan?

  • Quality? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ricochet81 ( 707864 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:39PM (#9444345)
    Isn't the quality of linux software rooted in that there are no timetables to get things working? It seems like quality comes from slow-moving community discussion and eventually a product. On the other hand, I would like to be able to throw money at some projects to get software faster.

    • Re:Quality? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MikeCapone ( 693319 ) <skelterhell AT yahoo DOT com> on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:43PM (#9444398) Homepage Journal
      Isn't the quality of linux software rooted in that there are no timetables to get things working?

      I think that in the case of most bounties, the point is not to get something faster but to get something at all; it's to encourage coders to work on some areas that may be less fun or obvious.

      Once the bounty is fufilled, nothing keeps people from taking their time and making it as good as possible.

    • Re:Quality? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by scorp1us ( 235526 )
      Getting the model down, and down right is 90% of the effort. After that hackers like me who fix bugs in other people's code will take it from there.

      I contribute dozens of lines a code a day to several projects, but I start very few of my own. Those get contributions from others too...

      But there is a lot to having just a working model, even if it is limted. Charting the path is hard, branching out from it is easy.
      • +1 insightful. Lacking modpoints and not having anything substantial to add, I just wanted to say that I agree.

        Having one/few individual/s coming up with something (that is free to hack away at), me-too-thinks is the #1 strength of the free (and OS) software community. I'm constantly in awe of how much amazing stuff people come up with all the time - and that perfect strangers rush to help tweak the h* out of it.

  • Government in on the act. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:40PM (#9444357) Homepage
    Maybe a litle OT but the fact that the US Federal Government has agreed to GPL "components" of it's total software developmnents is a much bigger story.

    There is a new website [core.gov] available and the estimated savings to the public sector is pegged at $56B / Year.

  • Rent-A-Coder (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:41PM (#9444375) Homepage Journal
    While the goal is noble, the result wont be what you think. These free-for-alls to get things like drivers written for money, honestly, doesn't have much real ground for success. Think about it. 10 developers start throwing a whole mess of their own free time into trying to get driver x done for y money. 9 of them will NOT get the money. Depending on the work that they put into it, chances are they will come to the conclusion that it isn't worth the effort, because not only is there no guarentee of a payoff, you will never KNOW the odds you are up against to be the one to get paid in the first place. This certainly keeps people from taking on this model as a means of making a living, and most people doing it in spare time will find it a waste.
    • Some (many?) people are driven by the idea of a competition. So it will appeal to some developers. They may fail at making one particular piece of software for the bounty, but that may spark them to try even harder for the next one. Perhaps we will see teams form that work together to complete projects faster, and then split the reward.

    • Explanation of Parent Subject (Score:5, Interesting)

      by WarriorPoet42 ( 762455 ) <nick@noSPAm.gibson-tech.com> on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:50PM (#9444463) Journal
      For those not in the know Rent-A-Coder [rentacoder.com] is a site where people/companies put up software projects, and (get this!) coders bid on the project. Once a coder is selected, the client puts the agreed upon fee in escrow. All communication (in theory) is conducted through the website, so that in cases of despute, there is a clear papertrail. At the end of the project, the escrow company releases the money to the coder. Badabing, badaboom.
      It sounds like a good place for young coders to get experience. In practice however, the overwhelming majority of jobs get placed to more experienced coders (read: RAC users with higher ratings). So even in the code-whoring business, the classic experience catch-22 remains in effect.
      • For all of the people that are thinking RAC sounds like a really good idea, be warned that you only get 85% of the money -- the site gets the other 15%. Also, it's not really true that the higher ranked members get most of the bids. Usually, people with no experience bid extremely low and win the bid. I know lots of people that are bidding on these projects, and if they win there's almost no way that they're making even minimum wage while they're working on them, they're just bidding so they'll have expe

    • I agree - If you say "first on there wins, everybody else gets nothing", why would anyone try? If you're going to pay for something to get done, why not let people bid on the project and make it open source? Then nobody wastes their time doing the same thing as a bunch of other people!

      These bounties are really odd. Can you imagine if structures were built that way? First one to build me a new arena, to spec, gets $1 Million! We'd either have no buildings at all or a bunch of partially-built shells.

      • Re:Rent-A-Coder (Score:2, Insightful)

        by mean pun ( 717227 )
        These bounties are really odd. Can you imagine if structures were built that way? First one to build me a new arena, to spec, gets $1 Million! We'd either have no buildings at all or a bunch of partially-built shells.

        Bad example. Competitions are very common for building design (i.e. architecture). For example, a quick Google on `architecture competition' gives this [extension-wto.org] one.

    • Re:Rent-A-Coder (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Not_Wiggins ( 686627 )
      Even more to the point, you won't be driving *quality*, you'll be driving for early availability... which is almost the antithesis of quality; quality takes time, the very thing that's being cut.

      No, I agree. I don't think this model will work, either. If I want to "win," then I need to develop ANY solution that works as quickly as possible, irrespective of how kludgey it might be. Maintainability? Extensibility? I'd be looking for as hard-coded as I can get!

      OTOH, I doubt the driver will be any less stab
      • You must be joking. Seriously. I recently switched from Windows to Linux, and I have some devices that simply don't have any support. Such as my HP scanner (not supported by sane), a USB voice/data/fax modem, a Broadcom based 802.11g card, etc. These are NOT new products. As it stands now, some of these products may never see the light of day in Linux. I would gladly contribute to a public bounty to get drivers for these devices. If no one comes forward with drivers, it won't cost me anything.

        You sa
        • The heart of what I was trying to get at was that the quality would "most probably" be the lowest with little chance of improvement beyond that.

          The reasoning why I say there's little chance of improvement is because if the company cared about longevity of the product, they'd build it themselves and keep the staff that has intimate knowledge of it around.

          Trying to debug someone else's device drivers can be a rather time-consuming/difficult task. Why even get into that position when you can start with some

    • Re:Rent-A-Coder (Score:2, Insightful)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      Depending on the work that they put into it, chances are they will come to the conclusion that it isn't worth the effort, because not only is there no guarentee of a payoff, you will never KNOW the odds you are up against to be the one to get paid in the first place. This certainly keeps people from taking on this model as a means of making a living, and most people doing it in spare time will find it a waste.

      This is exactly why professional auto racing failed to materialize at the dawn of the 20th centur
      • This is exactly why professional auto racing failed to materialize at the dawn of the 20th century and hasn't been heard of since.
        This isn't even close to the same business model... an (stupid) audience and advertising sponsors are assumed in the racing model.
        • This isn't even close to the same business model...

          Yes it is. A lot of pointless duplication of effort and expense, but only the winner gets payed. There is no way to tell in advance if you will ever collect dime one from your captial investment, which is likely to be quite substantial.

          an (stupid) audience and advertising sponsors are assumed in the racing model.

          No they aren't. Sponsorship wasn't even allowed in Grand Prix racing until 1968.

          KFG
      • Cause car races only pay for first place? Oh, you meant sponsorships from tobacco and alcohol companies will appear to pay for the coders who don't get the bounty?

        Wow, kfg can get modded up for anything.
        • Personal observation tells me that:

          Oh, you meant sponsorships from tobacco and alcohol companies will appear to pay for the coders who don't get the bounty?

          A)You are ignorant of the history of auto racing, particularly at the dawn of the 20th century, and:

          Wow, kfg can get modded up for anything.

          So can anyone else.

          KFG
    • I've checked out and registered for rent-a-coder.. From what I have seen, most projects fall into two catagories.
      1. EE or CS students that have no business being in their major looking for somebody to do their homework.
      2. Small businesses looking to spend $100 on a job that would normally cost in the tens of thousands.

      Personally for my consulting (I design embedded systems with PICs), I won't design something for less than around $4000(and at that price, even I'm cheap labor). I deliver high quality, work

  • Better link (Score:5, Informative)

    by braindead ( 33893 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:41PM (#9444376)
    There's a more readable version of the story on treocentral's stories page [treocentral.com]

  • Blender (Score:3, Informative)

    by suso ( 153703 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:42PM (#9444380) Journal
    I remember when the Blender 3D software was bought from the company NaN for $100,000, there was some speculation that it might not be a good thing if this kind of trend continues. Granted, this is a bit different. But maybe instead of just developing drivers, companies would wait around for someone to generate a big pot of money to make it worth it for them.
    • Ah, Blender... what a good product that could have been if it just had a more standard interface. Yes, I do know that it is said to be better once learned.

      But sad to say, people are not willing to spend the huge amount of time that it takes to relearn all that stuff - it would maybe work if that was your first app, but then you will have some hoops to hop through on a job market that goes more and moe towards Maya (which is excellent, but non-free and expensive).

      I've gotten a lot of great graphics artists
      • ### The Blender community seems to know this, but it is still unclear what they may or may not do about it... ;-/

        Blenders interface already has improved a whole lot after it went OpenSource. Its now already a lot better then before, sure still not perfect, but the progress is pretty good.

        And anyway, the interface itself has never been much of a problem for myself, sure not really intuitive, but once you have worked through a few tutorials, it shouldn't be much of an issue and it gives actually a nice work
        • Blenders interface already has improved a whole lot after it went OpenSource. Its now already a lot better then before, sure still not perfect, but the progress is pretty good.

          I shudder to think how it must have been; tests wer mostly done pretty recently, as in a few months back. Still, good that they are working on it, I hope they are not too "proud" to look at what has worked for others (while improvment, if it is actual improvment is of course a good thing in small enough doses to be easily adopted).

  • Already tried... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:42PM (#9444387)
    Remember SourceXchange? Remember CoSource?

    They occurred during the height of the .COM madness, and have since gone the way of the do-do. I was involved with one SourceXchange project and they had the most robust/complete bidding process of the two.

    I remember that CoSource had trouble attracting people to bid on projects. There were a number of interesting ideas, but little money.

    With SourceXchange the typical project was a semi-large idea with semi-real funding from somewhere (in my case it was Ricoh's research lab). I participated as an expert/reviewer and the coder-guy received only $10,000 or so for a whole lotta work. Not a good hourly rate if you ask me.

    - David
    • >I participated as an expert/reviewer and the >coder-guy received only $10,000 or so for a whole >lotta work. Not a good hourly rate if you ask me. You guys in USA are just a bunch of greedy bastards, thats all :). I earn $10k a year. Ther's this funny thing called Globalisation now. Beware of the sweaty Indian/Chinese/Russian coder working his ass of for the $2/h !.
      • I fuked up previous comment, damn word wrapping.

        >I participated as an expert/reviewer and the
        >coder-guy received only $10,000 or so for a whole
        >lotta work. Not a good hourly rate if you ask me.

        You guys in USA are just a bunch of greedy bastards, thats all :). I earn $10k a year. Ther's this funny thing called Globalisation now. Beware of the sweaty Indian/Chinese/Russian coder working his ass of for the $2/h !.

  • Neat niche, but not the future. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pavon ( 30274 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:44PM (#9444407)
    The problem with this is that it doesn't provide a stable paycheck. If you look at many open source projects, they refuse to take donations simply because the money wouldn't help them (other than hosting). If you are a volenteer free software developer, getting a few bucks might be nice, but it won't enable you to spend anymore time writting free software than you already do. You have commitments to your job, schooling and family, and in most cases you don't have the flexibility to work less job hours (and get paid less) as you get more donations. If developers will not accept donations for what they are already doing, why would they go after a bounty? So no, I don't see it being the future of free software. The future will continue to be a mix of businesses that use and need to improve open source software, and volenteers.

    • I accept donations [amazon.co.uk] - keep them coming ;)

      And I write software some popular [gnump3d.org], some not [steve.org.uk], donations are always a good thing!

    • I'm sorry, but every little bit helps. If working on an OSS project brings in $100 a month in donations, you're far more likely to continue it when your wife starts getting cross with you, your kids are bugging to to go play, your grades start slipping, your fishing rod starts to get brittle from lack of use or your boss starts giving you the eye for coming in late every morning after staying up all night hacking a hardware abstraction layer.
    • Sure, if you have a job, you might not be able to spend extra time on writing OSS, but what if you don't? There are plenty of students who code, and could use some extra money. And with coding jobs being outsourced...

  • That's a terrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:44PM (#9444408)
    That sounds like a great way to get several parallel development streams with zero colaboration going. This will either end with one working driver and several lesser quality broken drivers, or a whole bunch of half finished pieces of code. Either way you'll have end-user confusion.

    There must be a way to get that money used in a way that creates an environment where programmers help each other.
    • There must be a way to get that money used in a way that creates an environment where programmers help each other.

      That's usually called a "business."

      KFG

    • Re:That's a terrible idea (Score:2, Interesting)

      by 4lex ( 648184 )
      There's nothing stopping a company to hire several proficient coders and start catching bounties, one at a time or several in parallel, is it? It doesn't sound as a terrible idea to me.
    • What stops these stalled project teams from contacting one another, collaborating to complete the project? There's a proposed acceptance test, which will determine the single endorsed driver. If you don't like that one, use any of the "losers". Either way, it's better than nothing, which is the actual alternative.
  • ...particularly if the community can pony up the cash to pay whatever licensing fees (no, not the teabagging one) that kept them from getting access to different hardware specs until now.
  • This, to me, is what OSS has been missing- some form of incentive beyond the basic "I programmed it because it is neaty-keano". I may be a marxist, but I realize a basis of capitalism is rewarding people for hard work- or at least it's supposed to be.

    A down side of this specific one is the time limit- what if it can't be done by the deadline, what happens to money contributed? My suggestion- take away the time limit, allow anybody to contribute money, and when the pile of money is big enough, somebody will release something and get the money. It's slightly better odds than the lottery, so sure enough somebody will come up with a driver (or any other piece of software) for the heck of it.

    • This, to me, is what OSS has been missing- some form of incentive beyond the basic "I programmed it because it is neaty-keano". I may be a marxist, but I realize a basis of capitalism is rewarding people for hard work- or at least it's supposed to be.

      This is an arm-chair economist viewpoint of the OS incentives:

      Historically, there has been certain societies with a "giver" economy -- whoever had the biggest celibration or gave away the most gifts gained standing in their community. Some Polynesians

      • All of the above is very true- except for one little item; most of us are NOT independantly wealthy, and for such basics as food, clothing, shelter and clean water, we do NOT have a giver economy. But I'll agree that I missed it when concentrating on the itch scratching- my main reason for being involved in open source while using a closed source language (I haven't checked the Eula on Visual Studio lately- have the Gates lawyers banned using it for Open Source yet?) is because of itch scratching. And I f

  • TopCoder.com (Score:2, Informative)

    by Pov ( 248300 )
    This is essentially what they do at TopCoder [topcoder.com] all the time. It's a neat way to show off your skills and make a little money on the coding side and a discounted development cost for the company. Pretty slick idea.
  • Bidding for software works. This would allow programmers to do the shopping for the bidders based on the programmers skill set. The system could be written into the license so that once the job is performed the code is open for general use.

  • This is great and ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)

    by danharan ( 714822 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:52PM (#9444479) Journal
    How will the 'traditional' vision/scope> requirements> features> >recode> retest> demo> cycle expand to include the user community in the financing?
    Other people have suggested solutions that would include this before: The open code market [firstmonday.dk] was mentionned on slashdot a while back, and similar ideas [slashdot.org] were posted here as early as '99.

    But NO... these people will use a bounty, leading to perhaps many people competing for a puny amount of cash -duplication, anyone? And who wants to bet we'll end up with horribly unmaintainable spaghetti code everyone would rather re-write from scratch than reverse engineer because it lacks comments? Haven't we all kvetched about the horrible code that was shipped out to meet deadline with no regards to readability? A bounty would only make this worse.

  • Hackers only (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by litewoheat ( 179018 ) *
    You're not going to get a real company investing, speculatively, on such a thing. You'll get hackers for better or worse.

  • Despite the nay-sayers... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dagny Taggert ( 785517 ) <hankrearden@NospAm.gmail.com> on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:55PM (#9444508) Homepage
    ...I agree with the poster who mentioned the competition aspect of this. Many, many people will code for money, but the really good ones code to not only put food on the table, but know that they can be or are the best at what they do.
  • I suppose it's somewhat inappropriate to post "classified ads" or the like in a Slashdot thread, although maybe by doing so I'll help get /. to innovate in that field ;)

    I've started working on a model that I'm quite confident will both be profitable and allow for easy and effective user- and project owner-funded development of open source software. I have the skills and most of the capital (it takes very little w.r.t. basic operations), but in order to speed up the to-market time and develop a better servi

  • Horde does it too (Score:2, Informative)

    by ElForesto ( 763160 )

    The Horde Project does the same thing [horde.org]. They have bounties for writing specific features for their framework.

    So long as the project is very narrow and specialized, I don't think it's a bad thing. This particular example, though, is very broad and we as the end users may not end up getting good code from the "losers" incorporated into that driver.

  • Issuance of a bounty > maniacal development all over the place to get solution first > solution delivered by party X.
    Could it be any simpler? I actually prefer bounties to regular contracts. If you're the first one to get us X, you get $Y. What's the harm in that? It's almost like a reverse Dutch auction.
  • Would be nice if the J2ME bluetooth specification would be implemented on PalmOS. That way we could write real cross platform applications for handhelds.
  • I, for one, welcome our new capitalistic open-source funding overlords.

  • pay twice (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1. Release new hardware with crap drivers
    2. Have community pay you to write decent drivers
    3. Double++ PROFIT!!

  • Humor... (Score:3, Funny)

    by sublimusasterisk ( 539187 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @02:01PM (#9444579)
    The last visible post on the forum thread is...

    "This was just posted to slashdot... "


    Now of course, the server's down. Famous last words.

  • Wrong Motivation (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DCBoland ( 700327 )
    A developer rushing out code to win money isn't likely to test it thoroughly, and networking drivers are something that need to be reliable. Whilst it's a great way to get development started, this offer doesn't stipulate that the driver be Open Source, which IMO is vital for such an offer to be worthwhile. When the bugs almost gauranteed by rushed development become apparent, the winner isn't obliged to fix them... We don't need more rushed proprietary drivers, I'd like to see some more Open Source program
  • And I think the price of admission (just the spec) is more than the bounty is likely to be.

    The Sharp Zaurus is stuck at 2.4.18 linux kernel because the SD module can't be updated by the community.

  • Great idea but.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by WareW01f ( 18905 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @02:10PM (#9444654)
    It's not bloody likely. On two counts. The first being that the Treo 600 may not be compatable. I chased down individuals at the last PalmSource and tried to get to the bottom of why the 802.11 SD drivers where not being released. The main answer was that on some devices, the card would draw too much power (802.11 suck current, fancy that!) and could even fry the unit. ouch!

    The second is more political than anything else. Starting with OS 5.0 (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) the drivers aren't as easy to hack, the least of which is that they have to be in native ARM (as opposed to the PACE layer) Hell Armlets^H^H^H^H^H^H^H PNO's where like pulling teeth to write till resently). Things get worse in OS 6.0/Cobalt where the vendor can choose (and PalmOne will, if they ever release a Cobalt device) to require the drivers be signed in order to run. Great for preventing viruses, sucks for hackers such as myself that might want to hack on a device that I may not care to sell/commit to developer fees that may apply.

    And all this before reverse engineering the card itself. Better off to wait and hope that PalmOne releases a Treo with Bluetooth built in (nudge, wink [brighthand.com])

    That aside, no hurt in trying!
    • The SD 802.11b problems are power-related - but SD BT draws substantially less power than 802.11b. The consensus seems to be that this isn't a technical blocking issue for SD BT drivers.


      The other issues, I agree with, both the technical issue of getting native ARM drivers (well, that's pretty much the whole issue here), and the political issues of working with PalmOne which has become a nasty little company in many ways.

  • The odd thing... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @02:22PM (#9444765)
    I started mildly hacking on this very project about 2 days ago because I was so frustrated by my Treo 600's lack of Bluetooth, when the SDIO Bluetooth cards are right there for a reasonable price, but PalmOne refuses to release OS 5 driver support to avoid cannabalizing sales of their precious high-end OS 5 PDAs with integrated BT. The best starting point I found was this guy's site [whizoo.com]. Which prompted me to download the bluetooth drivers I could find from PalmSource and the remnants of the PluggedIn program from PalmOne. This segregation of Palm into a hardware and OS company has made it mighty difficult to even get decent developer information these days.


    Anyway, it sounds like Peter Easton at Whizoo has already suggested a starting point - rip the BT drivers from the Tungsten|T and rewrite the Palm OS 4 SD-BT transport layer PRC for ARM/OS 5. If all this driver does is receive calls from the main BT driver and dispatch calls/receive callbacks to/from the documented SD API, then perhaps it's not too difficult to rip it apart and figure out what it's doing and rewrite it? That's a big if of course. I've never really reverse engineered a Palm app myself, though I've done a decent amount of Palm OS programming (games and apps).


    But apparently IDA Pro supports Palm OS and M68k, so that might provide a reasonable route to disassembling the OS 4 transport layer PRC. Anyway, that's about as far as I've gotten with this - if anybody is interested, let me know, I do have some free time right now and I wouldn't mind putting it into solving this rather annoying problem (no, I don't really give a hoot about the bounty, but I'm going to go contribute 50 bucks to it anyway - I'd pay 100 bucks right now just for a copy of a BT driver that let me use my damn Treo 600).

    • Re:The odd thing... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Reverse engineering drivers should only be a very last-resort exercise. Why?

      Because hardware vendors will continue to think it's OK to not release documentation because, see, people are able to write drivers without it.

      Why would you help increase the market for a company with such an arrogant attitude?

      Instead they should be punished through lost sales to their competitor who did release information.

      And if there is no competition, you can still vote with your money. Simply don't buy the device. And if yo
  • I think that we should essentially use the current system the way it is. Hardware Businesses have dedicated programmers that churn out drivers (though the way it is now, they're for Windows only, and proprietary, though I'm not sure why), but they could release the source code to their drivers, and for Linux also now that there's a good size and growing customer base. They don't lose any cash by releasing the code, because you still have to buy the hardware.

    Is that model flawed at all?

    -Jesse

    • Re:I think: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kiryat Malachi ( 177258 )
      Yeah, a little.

      A lot of hardware R&D now goes, not just into the actual hardware, but into the firmware and driver that are required to make the hardware work. And while it seems like a copout, there are often good reasons that a company wouldn't want to give its competitors access to the work that went into that firmware/driver. Any time a competitor can gain access to your expensive, paid for development, for less than you paid to develop it, a company is not likely to do so - unless, like OpenOffi
  • Go here [treocentral.com]... If you are interested in pledging money for the cause.
  • Why should you pay taxes for development of public (free/open source) software? Fund your project through the Public Software Fund [pubsoft.org], and everyone who contributes gets to deduce their contribution from the US taxes.
    -russ
  • Typically, companies have a 'bid' put out, allowing the end companies to try and come up with a cheapest figure and a timeframe. It seems this is a permutation of this, where the contracting company says 'first to come up with an acceptable solution wins!' ... this might mean that speed is more important than quality development, which i do not support.

  • I ran into a similar case where a free (called shareware, but like the shareware of old, fully functional and not a demo) driver [palmoid.com] for Palm keyboards. It's much faster than vendor drivers. It can be done
  • *cough* sourceexchange *cough*

    oh yeah, it died a miserable death.

  • Good Idea, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lifebouy ( 115193 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @04:37PM (#9446322) Journal
    It seems to me that a better idea for this type of thing would be setting down criteria for a finished product, starting or selecting an OSS project for the product, and once the project meets the criteria, all coders who contributed to the project get a percentage of the prize based on the percentage of code or content they contributed.
    Say I wanted a database interface for a recipe program. I want it to be able to import data from some of the more popular cookbook programs out there, Betty Crocker or whatever, and I want to connect to something that amounts to FreeDB for recipes to get recipes from the web. I want it to be able to convert recipes and I want it to be able to give me nutrition info for the meals. I want to be able to make a menu and print me a shopping list, I want to be able to put in prices and know how much I will be spending(approximately). I want an easy interface for entering new recipes, and if I designate it as an original recipe or one with no copyright restrictions, I want the option of uploading it to the database mentioned above.
    So it seems to me I would be best off offering small rewards at the milestones, say 500 to 1000, depending mostly on budget, and a large one when it meets all the criteria. Now, and individual might choke on this, but maybe a hotel chain or restaurant chain would be willing to sponsor it, because it's a one-time expense that they can then use forever, or a long time, whereas before they were coughing up 2K everytime they wanted a new license, which adds up after 20 new restaurants. Then those same coders could turn around and put together a package of OSS software that caters to the needs of mom and pop restaurants, OO.o and the above idea, GNUcash, and whatever else they might need, train them how to use it and help them set it up for maybe 5k or so, wash rinse repeat, you have yourself a viable OSS business model.

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