The Commodore Community needs an Open Source future
This article does a good job of getting across the point I am trying to make. That point being that the Commodore Community, including commercial developers, can no longer afford to hoard information. We must collaboratively create operational models for all new hardware and share them freely and publicly so that anyone can use them. Those wishing to profit from this knowledge still can do so by actually making, selling, and supporting hardware based on those specifications.
We must move to a Linux like development model to survive. The hobby is just too niche to continue trying to compete by hoarding information.
There are already good examples of this happening to various degrees and I'm pleased with that. Now we just need to organize and work on these projects together.
For example. If all of the great minds in the Commodore hardware community were to get together and develop a fully open source design for a follow on to the Turbo Master and SuperCPU, we could easily come up with a very high quality, reasonably priced, basic specification for a Commodore 64/128 accelerator. By collaborating, we could also define standards for upgrades and expansion such that anyone could build compatible accelerators as well as expansions and upgrades for those accelerators. You could buy an accelerator from company A and an REU module from company B and an SD storage upgrade from company C.
http://www.linux.com/news/hardware/peripherals/792185-take-control-with-open-source-hardware
Agreed... think about something like uIEC or Contiki... share with the community... if you want to make money, fine, just be prepared to ship real hardware/software and offer support.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, I agree that the Linux model is a good (best?) model to expand the Commodore horizon. All my innovative (not necessarily popular) software and documentation have been released open-source (most often GNU license). Other projects like uIEC, Contiki, and VICE follow suit... I hope we all can
:)