On Jun 10, 2007, at 2:59 AM, David Woolley wrote:
I imagine the tooling cost means that it is cheaper for an
individual to buy the board, a legitimate competitor would respect
the copyright and a dodgy one could recreate the artwork in about
the time it takes to construct one kit.
Correct. OTOH, the would-be competitor would not likely be able to
innovate to the level required to be competitive. Even if the
competitor started out even with the hardware and software, the
competitor would quickly fall behind because the competitor does not
have the necessary innovative people.
This is why both trade secret and patents do not produce the results
expected.
software is hardware-specific, it is unlikely that it will give other
Personally I tend to believe that, where the business model is
based on selling the hardware, it is good to "open source" the
supporting software, or at least publish it with a no-commercial
use clause. However, it continually irritates me how many hardware
vendors won't even publish sufficient information to write a device
driver.
I have seen that too. It is a pain and tends to lock us into things
like Windows.
It's more difficult for things like APRS, which I believe is not
legally implementable by amateurs.
Huh? I thought Bob Bruninga published the spec for APRS in one of the
ARRL/TAPR/AMRAD digital conferences and anyone could do it.
vendors a leg up to see the Elecraft source code. So two things
happen by making Elecraft's software open:
2. Anyone can generate a software build. Even if Elecraft stopped
developing a particular radio, owners can still enhance their
equipment,
I'm not sure whether the Elecraft people are basically businessmen
or amateur radio people, but for a businessman, the ability to
kill a product has the advantages that:
- you can cease supporting an early product without having sales of
later products undermined by competitors, or end users, who continue
to maintain the earlier one;
The people who will take advantage of this sort of thing are a
relatively small part of the market. How many people the ham
community actual pick up a soldering iron these days? Precious few.
These are the only ones for whom software escrow or open software
becomes an issue. Therefore, for the large percentage of the market,
this is a non-issue and will have no impact on future sales.
- you increase the value of the company to a competitor when you come
to retire, etc., as the competitor can remove your product from the
market.
If the old product is such competition to the new product, you
haven't done a very good job on the new product.
Consider the K2 and the K3. Do you not agree that the K3 is
sufficiently advanced relative to the K2 that the K2 presents no real
challenge to the K3? If a competitor would buy Elecraft for the K3
technology, either to use it to get a leg up on their other
competitors or to kill the K3, support for the K2 is not likely to be
an issue.
Microsoft rely on being able to kill products; preferably by making
them appear unfashionable, but also by withdrawing even security
support, to force people to upgrade, and by locking the licence to
a specific hardware instance, to force software upgrades on
hardware upgrades.
Perhaps I am an idealist but I like to think that products get better
and justify themselves that way. The problem Microsoft has is that
there really isn't all that much substantive you can add to an
operating system to really justify an upgrade. Instead MS relies on
flashy visual things instead of substantive underlying structural
improvements. Many people realize that there really isn't an
advantage of Vista over XP over 2000 and therefore there really isn't
a need to upgrade. Microsoft then has to force the issue with the
customer.
Now if Microsoft were to add features like the zetabyte file system,
virutalization, reduced context switching time, etc., then there
would be a real reason to upgrade as there would be real performance
advantages.
2. Others with good ideas can add functionality and features to
the radio without having to wait for Elecraft to get around to it.
Elecraft
This is double edged. It can lead to increased primary sales, but
it can also damage the after market for the primary company.
It is a competitive market. Sun and Apple both recognize that their
R&D dollars are smaller than Microsoft's. Both Sun and Apple have
thrown their operating systems 'open'. I believe this is an attempt
to help find the talented people who will make improvements that keep
them ahead of the guys with the bigger wallets.
can even fold good, well thought-out features back into the
"official" source tree.
A really competent company will do this and will also counter-
innovate, but most companies prefer to use secrecy instead, as it
is more predictable.
An interesting example of openness is the Internet. There you had
competitors innovating cooperatively and the results were to vastly
grow the market. That is a way to make a lot more money without
having to try to take market share from someone else.
> much in the way we still have folks experimenting with older vacuum
> tube (valve) kit today.
The move to software and protection of software by secrecy is
generally a bad thing for innovation by amateurs (in a general
sense). In the past, whether or not strictly legal, non-commercial
developers were not impacted by patents, but these days they cannot
get the information needed to innovate. In the short term, that
fits in with fact that Western economies are now intellectual
property economies, but in the longer term it seems to me that it
will reduce the supply of innovators and it is already resulting in
a vast amount of duplicated effort.
I agree.
Elecraft are in the border area between amateur as learner and
innovator and amateur as appliance operator. Companies selling to
the latter role are just selling to yet another consumer technology
product, and want good consumers, not innovators.
I agree.
One other possible reason for restricting the firmware is that
releasing it facilitates overriding operating frequency ranges,
etc. Legislating restrictions is easy for governments, although I
would argue that, where national security is involved, recreating
sufficient firmware from scratch is well within the capabilities of
most insurgent groups who might otherwise find the hardware easy to
import and better than alternatives.
To some extent I agree. Unless Elecraft is actively pursuing sales in
restrictive countries, they are not likely to run into the problem. I
think that they are just trying to meet current demand.
73 de Brian, WB6RQN
Brian Lloyd - brian HYPHEN wb6rqn AT lloyd DOT com
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