Jon, thanks for sharing your thoughts! > Is freedom really innovation? As in we have the freedom to make our own WPAN? ... > Or, are we caught just doing the same thing that is happening in > industry, but without any money?
When you get wireless connectivity in a piece of copyleft hardware, you can expect to *) be able to incrementally improve or modify many more things than you typically could, without the need of a large investment or large team. *) be able to manufacture the same or an improved solution, because not only the result was published, but also how it got there. See for example the extensive test tools Werner created as part of the ben-wpan development, for antenna performance testing etc. *) be able to verify whether the communication protocols embody principles you find valuable, to avoid interested parties twisting the behavior of the network in their favor (neutrality, QoS, lawful interception, etc) Those are the core things that you will uniquely and typically find in copyleft hardware wireless solutions. On top of that of course we still have to implement useful applications. At the point of the application, to the user it will often not matter whether that succeeds on a proprietary or on a free network. The user will rightfully only judge whether stuff works or not. I'm quite optimistic though that once we unleash it right, we will in fact see the most spectactular new wireless applications on copyleft hardware, for the very reasons listed above. Was this helpful? Wolfgang _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
