wrote:
Was NACA and Guggenheim paying these people to collaborate?

If so, how is that open source like the open source software movement?
No one is getting paid to share their knowledge in open source. You
have to share your knowledge without compensation -- that's how it
works. You don't sell your hard won knowledge. You give it away so
others can benefit from it.

IBM, HP and Sun are a few corporate contributors to open source efforts.
Their employees do get paid. For that matter, so do the employees of
Redhat and Xandros.


What about WWII and after? Sharing open source super sonic secrets?

Stanford, and other benefactors of Guggenheim are still publishing their
work as well, and much of it can be accessed for free through libraries,
and sometimes the universities themselves. NASA is still publishing
materials and they are still free. Much of the post WWII material
covers supersonic flight and the engineering challenges it presents. Do
you know of many super sonic homebuilts?


Anyway that's a lot of ******** and besides the point.

Inconvenient facts is a better description.


Open source software projects are often poorly tested pieces of half
working junk written ad hoc and often by very immature, inexperience
developers. The Linux kernel is an exception. Apache is an exception.
For each of these there are 10 thousand pieces of crap.

Homebuilt aircraft are often poorly tested pieces of half
working junk designed ad hoc and often by very immature, inexperience
builders. So what. There are plenty of exceptions there too.


You're free to share and collaborate all you want. Go for it.

Isn't that the purpose of this group? And the EAA for that matter.


Charles