Free plans? Open source plans?

On Jan 26, 11:40*pm, "Morgans" wrote:
"BobR" 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.

That's putting it a bit too simplistic, don't you think?

Wright brothers didn't use a stiff outer skin of cloth and resin to carry
the loads, did they? *How about a feathering tail on a spaceship?

If you want to put it that way, Leonardo Da Vinci was copied by the Wright
Brothers.
--
Jim in NC

A bit simplistic maybe but not inaccurate. The canard design is not
that far removed from the Wright Brothers tail first design. Aviation
once proven possible has been largely evolutionary throughout its
development with the major breakthroughs being made in the early
years. Technology has allowed us to refine the designs but the basics
have not changed. The feathering tail on a spaceship is interesting
but hardly revolutionary.

"Bryan Martin" wrote in message
...
In article
,
wrote:


If open source airplane designs worked like open source software I
wouldn't go near the end product -- because my life would depend on
it.

And if I ever find out open source software is running aircraft
systems I won't fly on it. But of course that will never happen.

You'd rather fly an airplane with systems running in Windows rather than
Unix? I don't think you have a clue.

--
Bryan Martin
N61BM, CH 601 XL, Ram Subaru, Stratus redrive.



He http://www.lynuxworks.com/solutions/.../arinc-653.php

Amateur built airplanes are the same way. *You have the plans. *You can
change anything you like.

You paid for your airplane plans (or not) -- change them all you want.

You *might* have paid for your Linux distribution. You can change it
all you want.

You can fly in airplanes running open source software for their
control systems and avionics. And you can change that software too.

I have *nothing* against anyone building any contraption they like to
fly in (as long as it doesn't fall on me or mine).

But I value my skin too much to fly in or build just anything some
random amateur has designed. Software, that's one thing. If your Linux
kernel crashes because you you have a dangling pointer somewhere, so
what? Just reboot. Unless that software is controlling your
elevator ...

And aircraft? Anyone who's spent a little time reading even the basics
of aircraft design should realize it's very tricky biz.

Hat's off to you, though. I'm all for the experimental category.

And if I ever find out open source software is running aircraft
systems I won't fly on it. But of course that will never happen.

I would sooner fly with open source software running my aircraft than
anything put out by Microsoft or Apple. *Nothing would put the fear of
flying into me more than thinking that I was dependent on anything put
out by those to companies.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I wouldn't fly with any software by them either.

In fact I don't like software controlling aircraft at all. Written by
anyone. The more software gets involved in aircraft control, the more
major crashes will be traced back to a "software glitch." It's
happened already.

I won't be surprised if the 777 at Heathrow won't be some kind of
software glitch.

F0k that.

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.

Open source DEMANDS that it's a fundamental right to know how
something works.

Anybody wants to give their ideas away, fine by me.

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

On Jan 29, 12:02*am, Charles Vincent wrote:
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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

On 2008-01-29, wrote:
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.

Wrong. There are lots of folks getting paid to work on open source software.
I've occasionally even been one of them.

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.

That 99% of everything is crap doesn't make the stuff that isn't any less
good. Some of the best software available today is open source. Don't reject
any software because it's open source (or not). Pick, or reject, it because
of how good it is.

(Yeah, I'm biased a bit, as I'm the project manager of a piece of open
source software that's a leader in its field. I'll proudly stand Hercules up
against anything else.)
--
Jay Maynard, K5ZC http://www.conmicro.com
http://jmaynard.livejournal.com http://www.tronguy.net
http://www.hercules-390.org (Yes, that's me!)
Buy Hercules stuff at http://www.cafepress.com/hercules-390

wrote:
And if I ever find out open source software is running aircraft
systems I won't fly on it. But of course that will never happen.
I would sooner fly with open source software running my aircraft than
anything put out by Microsoft or Apple. Nothing would put the fear of
flying into me more than thinking that I was dependent on anything put
out by those to companies.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I wouldn't fly with any software by them either.

In fact I don't like software controlling aircraft at all. Written by
anyone. The more software gets involved in aircraft control, the more
major crashes will be traced back to a "software glitch." It's
happened already.

I won't be surprised if the 777 at Heathrow won't be some kind of
software glitch.

F0k that.


Like there were no crashes before software got involved. The question is
how many accidents didn't happen because of software intervention.
Unfortunately we will never know.