Ohhh goody, PDA software price wars!

Actually, my (mis)infomation on non-commercial software
comes from extensive research in Open Source community
motivations and behaviors, including survey research
of several thousand Open Source developers. I think
facts normally trump opinions/anecdotes.

I don't think of making money as a bad motivation for
developing software. Writing soaring software is a
particularly tough way to make a living, so I'm willing
to support the guys who have the nerve to do it.

For those of you who develop soaring apps for the personal
satisfaction, good for you. If you don't want my money
at least you have my gratitude.



At 00:54 22 February 2004, Mark Hawkins wrote:
All I can say is, 'Hear, Hear!!' I took a bit of offense
at this as well but just marked it up to misinformation.
The whole notion that if a product doesn't cost that
is MUST not be worth anything is non-sense. However,
it is still VERY prevalent. Oh well, it's not my money
that's being spent. Later!-Markwww.soaringpilot.org
At 17:54 21 February 2004, Henryk Birecki wrote:Andy
Blackburn wrote:Free software works, but only to the
extent that youcan keep a community of talented volunteers
interestedin continuing to innovate and support the
product (thelatter being the tougher part since programmers
tendnot to like all the administrative BS associate
withproduct support).You have a highly flawed assumption
above. Those that
provide freesoftware do it for a reason, and their
support is as
good as of anycommercial organization. Have you ever
tried getting
real support fromMicrosoft? A community of volunteer
programmers helps,
but success ofa commercial product depends on an analogous
existance
of motivated(maybe by money) programmers, so a commercial
product
can stop itsdevelopment as well.Personally, I don't find a few hundred bucks
to beall that much to pay for what these products do
inYou are lucky.terms of increasing the enjoyment and
safety of cross-countryand racing flights - not to
mention the potential forimprovement in overall pilot
performance. I boughta copy of WinPilot Pro last year
and paid for copyof SeeYou mobile. Consider it a subsidy
for continueddevelopment. They're both quite good pieces
of softwareand I hope they both prove successful in
the market.I think there is a contradiction here with
your previous
thoughts.Since they are commercial products they do
not need
subsidy. If youwant to subsidise 'increasing the enjoyment
and safety
ofcross-country and racing flights - not to mention
the
potential forimprovement in overall pilot performance'
consider
finding some way tocontribute to efforts of those that
do that for soaring
population atlarge. This does not necessarily mean
monetary renumeration.Henryk Birecki

"Andy Blackburn" wrote in message
...
Actually, my (mis)infomation on non-commercial software
comes from extensive research in Open Source community
motivations and behaviors, including survey research
of several thousand Open Source developers. I think
facts normally trump opinions/anecdotes.


Not on the internet they don't.

Andy Blackburn wrote:

Actually, my (mis)infomation on non-commercial software
comes from extensive research in Open Source community
motivations and behaviors, including survey research
of several thousand Open Source developers. I think
facts normally trump opinions/anecdotes.


Well, that is actually rather pompous. What facts?

Henryk Birecki

Even Linux is moving to a licenced platform for its latest incarnations. I
have seen a lot of software move this way lately. An originally open source
or free project matures to such an extent that it demands more of the core
programmers than can be done on a free basis. The real contributors still
have access to the source but the 'hangers on' get a real product at a
reasonable cost and businesses grow out of the supply and support of the
products.

It's just an alternative business model. A programmer believes he can do it
better and to drive the development he offers his product for free. The
early adopters allow him to develop to a solid application and then he can
start charging.

Ian


"Henryk Birecki" wrote in message
...
Andy Blackburn wrote:

Actually, my (mis)infomation on non-commercial software
comes from extensive research in Open Source community
motivations and behaviors, including survey research
of several thousand Open Source developers. I think
facts normally trump opinions/anecdotes.


Well, that is actually rather pompous. What facts?

Henryk Birecki

Sure, both of these are normal and reasonable scenarios for software
project development and commercial product development. It does not
however have impact on either the quality of freeware, nor support,
nor the length of time a "product" remains on the market. There is
plenty of poor quality freeware out there, and there is plenty of poor
quality shareware, and "commercial" products. The same can be said by
substituting good for poor.

Interestingly the only "support problem reports" I ever hear about on
r.a.s. have to do with commercial products that people pay for.

Henryk Birecki

"tango4" wrote:

Even Linux is moving to a licenced platform for its latest
incarnations. I have seen a lot of software move this way lately. An
originally open source or free project matures to such an extent that
it demands more of the core programmers than can be done on a free
basis. The real contributors still have access to the source but the
'hangers on' get a real product at a reasonable cost and businesses
grow out of the supply and support of the products.

It's just an alternative business model. A programmer believes he can
do it better and to drive the development he offers his product for
free. The early adopters allow him to develop to a solid application
and then he can start charging.

Ian


"Henryk Birecki" wrote in message
.. .
Andy Blackburn wrote:

Actually, my (mis)infomation on non-commercial software
comes from extensive research in Open Source community
motivations and behaviors, including survey research
of several thousand Open Source developers. I think
facts normally trump opinions/anecdotes.


Well, that is actually rather pompous. What facts?

Henryk Birecki

Let me add my comment on the free soaring applications:

I use soaringpilot and saw Mark Hawkins to support lot of newcomers
(like I was a year ago) without hesitation. In my job I use several
expensive test tools ( 100k US$) and none of them has the same support
like this...
Regards,

/Janos

My guess is that most of the current crop of programs
written for Pocket PC OS could be ported to a Tablet
PC pretty easily -- that would be a start.

As a general case you'd just need a computer with a
bright color display and a serial port to communicate
with the GPS/logger. If it's a vanilla Wintel system
then current software might do. If you want to do something
like run on Linux, then you need a major rewrite or
new software altogether. Possible, but a bigger challenge.

Getting a big display bright enough to see in direct
sunlight without running the battery down might be
the biggest challenge - just try taking you laptop
outside on a sunny day as an experiment.


At 23:54 22 February 2004, Kilo Charlie wrote:
Well I would hope that sometime soon these screens
would be available. The
real question is whether or not the manufacturers that
currently sell the
units (CAI, Ilec, etc) would support this type of system.
There would have
to be some agreement upon the hardware part of it wouldn't
there? I guess
that it did happen with VHS and DVD's but not without
a few outliers such as
Sony's beta. With so little money in this industry
we should just be
thankful that we have nice toys to choose from currently
but the small
displays have become a limiting factor. Also I'm tainted
after having seen
one of the new Garmin (1000?) setups in a Gulfstream
I went through a few
weeks ago.

Casey Lenox
KC
Phoenix

"Andy Blackburn" wrote in message
...
My guess is that most of the current crop of programs
written for Pocket PC OS could be ported to a Tablet
PC pretty easily -- that would be a start.

As a general case you'd just need a computer with a
bright color display and a serial port to communicate
with the GPS/logger. If it's a vanilla Wintel system
then current software might do. If you want to do something
like run on Linux, then you need a major rewrite or
new software altogether. Possible, but a bigger challenge.

Getting a big display bright enough to see in direct
sunlight without running the battery down might be
the biggest challenge - just try taking you laptop
outside on a sunny day as an experiment.

I've thought about this, a little. There is a company that makes a woven
mat fiberoptic backlight.
The sharp bends in the fiberoptic material allow the light to escape, and it
provides a pretty even illumination.
Usually a bundle of fiberoptic goes to a source like an LED.
But if you had a large mat somewhere (on the top of the instrument panel,
perhaps) collecting sunlight, and a smaller mat (with perhaps two or three
layers) as the backlight, then the brighter ambient is, the brighter your
backlighting.

Tim Ward

"Andy Blackburn" wrote in message
...

Getting a big display bright enough to see in direct
sunlight without running the battery down might be
the biggest challenge - just try taking you laptop
outside on a sunny day as an experiment.


The laptop/tablet screen vendors are always trying for the widest viewing
angle and advertise the fact as a feature. This spreads the energy from the
backlight over a wide angle and mandates a much brighter backlight for
acceptable viewing. This, in turn, makes the LCD screen backlight one of
the major drains on a laptop battery.

In a glider cockpit it would be much better for the screen to concentrate
its light toward the small area occupied by the pilots eyes. This would
significantly increase the perceived brightness while reducing the power
drain. Fortunately, such screens are available and they tend to be cheaper.

On the other hand, all plastic, super bright, low power OLED screens are
said to be only a couple of years away.

Bill Daniels

Agree with Ian - even more broadly there are combinations
on all three of the major dimensions of software models
- Intellectual Property (GPL versus alternatives that
don't require turning over your IP), development (social
network versus command heirarchy), and commercial model
(free, license, paid support, etc.). None is good or
bad per se but I believe different combinations are
more or less effective in different 'market' situations.
Even the boys in Redmond are looking at some dimensions
of this for their own internal use - just don't expect
them to embrace the GPL.

With respect to facts about the motivations of Open
Source and Linux developers specifically the research
focuses on who they are, how the spend their time,
what their day jobs are and why they do what they do.
The earlier comment here (and supported broadly) is
correct that many of these developers are early in
their careers and trying earn recognition for their
talents as programmers -- either for the intrinsic
value of it, or because they think it will help them
advance professionally. For others much of the code
they write supports their day jobs in large IT organizations.
There is no evidence that they are particularly interested
in earning recognition for their skills in operating
a customer support call centers - in fact most of them
have day jobs that preclude this. Consequently, you
normally see great response to fixing bugs and plugging
security holes (something that the community model
is distinctively good at), but if you want someone
to hold your hand for half a day (starting right now)
as you struggle through some configuration or deployment
issue, I'd argue you're better off paying the likes
of Red Hat.

With respect to soaring software - the 'teams' that
do this are generally small enough that the customer
experience with respect to product functionality, quality
and support comes down to individual personalities.
I would observe that to-date the commercial products
seem to be making more rapid progress on functionality.
I suspect this is because they dedicate their daytime
hours to development and, conversely, that the non-commercial
alternatives find it challenging to build a development
community out of the arguably narrow intersection of
software developers, glider pilots and individuals
with adequate discretionary time. Not that it couldn't
happen or that a single, motivated individual or two
can't get a lot done.

Hope that sounds less pompous. Now back to flying...

At 17:36 23 February 2004, Henryk Birecki wrote:
Sure, both of these are normal and reasonable scenarios
for software
project development and commercial product development.
It does not
however have impact on either the quality of freeware,
nor support,
nor the length of time a 'product' remains on the market.
There is
plenty of poor quality freeware out there, and there
is plenty of poor
quality shareware, and 'commercial' products. The same
can be said by
substituting good for poor.

Interestingly the only 'support problem reports' I
ever hear about on
r.a.s. have to do with commercial products that people
pay for.

Henryk Birecki

'tango4' wrote:

Even Linux is moving to a licenced platform for its
latest
incarnations. I have seen a lot of software move this
way lately. An
originally open source or free project matures to such
an extent that
it demands more of the core programmers than can be
done on a free
basis. The real contributors still have access to the
source but the
'hangers on' get a real product at a reasonable cost
and businesses
grow out of the supply and support of the products.

It's just an alternative business model. A programmer
believes he can
do it better and to drive the development he offers
his product for
free. The early adopters allow him to develop to a
solid application
and then he can start charging.

Ian


'Henryk Birecki' wrote in message
. ..
Andy Blackburn wrote:

Actually, my (mis)infomation on non-commercial software
comes from extensive research in Open Source community
motivations and behaviors, including survey research
of several thousand Open Source developers. I think
facts normally trump opinions/anecdotes.


Well, that is actually rather pompous. What facts?

Henryk Birecki