Sylvain wrote:
so in short, the only reasonable long term stragegy would be to make
these things open source; I couldn't agree more, but how do you
go about achieving this? the manufacturer must either be coerced in
doing it (via regulations) or have a good incentive, i.e., a
painfully obvious -- as in, that even the most bone-headed MBA
waiving PHB manager could understand -- evidence that it would
be in their best interest to open up at least the interface
specs. But considering what I have seen so far in the industry
I am not holding my breath...

Unfortunately, you're right about this... I am not all that crazy about
the idea of regulatory standards though... Once you get the government
involved in something, often, it gets rapidly screwed up...

When I was wanting to interface a program with the Northstar M1A LORAN,
it took a bit of digging to find out who to contact, but they did not
have a problem sending me a copy of the actual interface document...
Yeah, it was probably a Xerox copy of a copy of a copy, but it was
sufficiently readable and I did not have a problem understanding what
would be necessary to write a program to interface with it... Still, the
problem is that if I wanted to also make the program work with a
different unit, I would have to get the interface document and write
code for the different unit... Hell, even with NMEA 0183 that is output
by nearly every handheld GPS, the output stream from one manufacturer
might vary from what a different manufacturer might choose to send...
Some manufacturers use one particular NMEA 0183 sentence for position
reporting whereas another manufacturer might use a different sentence...
If you look at some of the PC based moving map programs, you'll see that
they might give you an option on the type of GPS that you have... If
they have a pretty good selection of them and your GPS is not one of
them, it's at least possible that your GPS will be similar enough to one
of the ones that they do support for it to work for you... On the other
hand, some of the GPS manufacturers utilize a binary NMEA format instead
of the standard text based one...