[Noisebridge-discuss] what could we do with one of these babies..

[Jonathan Foote]

Right -- not disputing it's a nice piece of hardware, and that their
software terms are open.

But if you write software for it, they stand to benefit, possibly
substantially more than you. Not that that's a bad deal for a research
group or a hackerspace, but sharing or even publicizing your work,
means publicity and sales for them, as few people could build their
own, and those who could might not even be able to if the hardware
design is insufficiently open.

While your time and skills may seem like a fine trade for this nice
piece of kit, if you have the chops to do something useful with it you
should realize you have a commodity in demand and understand that you
are giving it away for someone else's corporate benefit. (If you don't
think this is the case, how much do you think Willow pays their
engineers?) Not even saying that's a bad thing, just be aware of cui
bono.


On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Andy Isaacson <adi at hexapodia.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 08:26:35AM -0700, Jonathan Foote wrote:
>> In fact, it's not clear how "open" their hardware platform is (can we
>> get schematics and part sources at cost?)  so "open" may actually be
>> an abuse of the term...
>
> Well, at least their "ROS" source is BSD licensed according to
> http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/ros-platform
>
> Holy christ their design includes a lot of expensive parts.
> http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/robots/technical-specs
>
> Two $3000 Xeon servers, two $5000 laser scanners, four
> probably-multi-thousand-dollar cameras, no make that five cameras ...
> and we haven't even gotten to the mechanicals, which I'm completely
> unqualified to price out.
>
> Nice work if you can get it!
>
> -andy
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