Phil,
No intent to be provacative here.  Just curious as to your thoughts on this.  
What business advantage is there to completely opening up the firmware to 
open-source?  Yes, I understand and believe in the advantage of having many 
freely contributing developers working on the platform.  On the other hand, I 
also understand that the competition **cough**Roku**cough or frankly any other 
competitor will gladly suck up any open sourced innovation provided to them, 
and will probably not make any comparable investment into the community that 
built the application in the first place.  I much preffered Sean's (I think, 
could have been another SLIM employee) suggestion that certain significant 
portions of the firmware, like codec modules, might be released for work under 
open source licensing terms.  Let  SLIM hold the familty jewels so they can get 
a return on the investment they have made.
 
Mike

        -----Original Message----- 
        From: Phil Karn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
        Sent: Fri 3/11/2005 8:38 PM 
        To: Slim Devices Discussion 
        Cc: 
        Subject: Re: [slim] Open firmware for SB2?
        
        

        Sean Adams wrote:
        
        > That was SLIMP3 firmware, which was all code I wrote myself, so we 
could
        > release it however we wanted. Squeezebox and Squeezebox2 include 3rd
        > party proprietary OS and wireless drivers and require a $30,000
        > development kit in order to write code for them. These are just a few 
of
        > the obstacles to opening up firmware development.
        
        Well, I suppose an alternative would be to open up all the necessary
        hardware specs (if they're not already open) and encourage an
        independent open source firmware development from scratch. If or when it
        surpasses the stock firmware in features and stability, you could switch
        to it.
        
        Phil
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