wrote:
When you get right down to it....the aviation industry has been open
source since it began. All the advancements in aviation design have
been largely improvements on prior designs. Hell, even Rutans designs
are throwbacks to the Wright Brothers.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I don't think you know what open source means.

Most aviation advances have been held strictly secret, either by
companies or by governments. Nobody advertises their advances to their
potential adversaries.

The Wright brothers took to the air on wings that had an airfoil that
had evolved from the experiments of Otto Lilienthal, which they read
about from Lilienthal's own writings. Their wire and strut braced wing
evolved from early experiments and designs of Octave Chanute, who not
only freely shared his discoveries with the Wrights, he visited them at
least once. In fact, Chanute organized an international conference to
share information on aeronautics. The Wright brothers were keen to
patent their advancements, not keep them secret. It is pretty hard to
keep something secret when it is in plain sight for all to see, like for
example Bleriot's modern tractor design which quickly eclipsed flying
bedsteads like the Curtiss and the Wright flyer. After World War one,
when the US realized any lead they had in aviation was not only history
but they were now way outclassed, people like Gugenheim and the US
government (through NACA), went out of their way to foster open sharing
of information. Guggenheim did it by bringing top flight theorists to
the US (students of Rankine, Prandtl and Froude) to teach and NACA did
it by systematic experimentation and dissemination of the results. This
pretty much continued up until WWII. In fact, I have papers and
books from US efforts during WWII that not only reference the pre war
work of Japanese researchers, but laud them.

Charles