Quote:
Originally Posted by firekat
To me, iRex gives me the impression that they see the iLiad as their child and they are not very willing to let anyone tell them what they can/cannot or should do with the device.
Good Luck To Us All!
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Sorry, but I just have to react to this; the iRex team has sought contact with the open source community, but they don't come from the open source world, and there is indeed a cultural difference. At least, that was the case a couple of years ago, and from what I've seen on their website, it still is to some extent. As an organiser of FOSDEM (yearly open source convention held in Brussels, usually the last week of February) I can confirm that at least they tried in their own way. I think it was at FOSDEM 2006 when a bunch of iRex guys came to present their new toy to the Free and Open Source Software community with the intention of learning what the FOSS community was all about, and how they could work together with that community to foster new development for this new device.
In the end, we had to kick them out though because they were causing bottlenecks in the main hallway of the venue. It's in a university, and when you line the halls with booths, you're cutting off 1/3rd of the width of the hallways. The iRex guys came without announcing, without consulting us, and attracting large crowds around them (actually between them and the booths) that made passage through the main corridor difficult for our visitors. Personally, I felt a bit sad about this because it was clear they came with good intentions, but the wrong approach. They came because they had no clue how the open source community worked and wanted to make first contact, and see where that got them.
As far as I can see, they're willing, but just not on the same frequency as the rest of the FOSS community, and somewhat afraid to let too many cooks in the kitchen spoiling the broth. It's a common fear with a lot of these companies: when third-party developers release crap that bricks their device or has other unintended but harmful side effects, it might reflect negatively on their product since the unwashed masses might not realise that it's the third party app that's at fault and not the device itself. So typically those companies open up only that which they're required to do under the GPL, which usually means just the patches to the Linux kernel since the rest is usually custom developed. But that's just my interpretation.
[edit] Woops, sorry, seems I resurrected an ancient thread. Followed a link from another discussion, and didn't check the dates to make sure my reply was still relevant. Is there a way to delete, 'coz edit/delete just lets me edit...