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> All the hardware and software would have been publicly available at the cost of an annual membership fee to the TRON Association. Ranging from about $23,000 a
by jandrese 3y ago
> All the hardware and software would have been publicly available at the cost of an annual membership fee to the TRON Association. Ranging from about $23,000 a year down to a modest $4,600.
Cause of death identified. They wanted to do open source with a paywall. A fee structure well outside of what a hobbyist can afford, but hobbyists are the core of open source.
- hamandcheese 3y ago> but hobbyists are the core of open source. Is this actually true? Is it true when looking only at core projects like the Linux kernel?
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoHobbyists grow up to be contributors. If they can’t become hobbyists because the cost is high, they’ll never become contributors either.
- jandrese 3y agoIt’s less true for the kernel than it is for most open source projects. The kernel has a fair bit of corporate backing now, but out in user land there are way more projects being maintained by volunteers because they find value in it.
- Sakos 3y agoNow, yes, but it wouldn't have so much corporate backing now without all the hobbyist contributors before. And even now there are so many OSS projects, so many core libraries that entire industries and businesses are reliant on which are kept alive by a handful of people or even just a single person with no corporate backing at all. Corporate backing is the exception, not the rule.
- ryukafalz 3y agoTo use an example that's relevant here given the smart home context: Home Assistant has a huge community of hobbyists around it, and I think it's fair to say it couldn't have gotten nearly as far as it has without community contributions.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoLinux is a combination, but it's worth noting that it wouldn't exist without hobbyist work. That said, it would be interesting to do a breakdown of how much work comes from corporate vs individual contributors for, say, all the packages in a default install of some popular distros. (Also it sounds like a nightmare to try and do that analysis (ex. how do you even determine corp/non-corp contributors?), but it would be interesting if you could do it)
- numpad0 3y agoHobbyists/government subsidized University students in CS/CE certainly forced a lot of Pareto optimal paths that won't be chosen in committee developments in open-source movement and projects. I'd not think that e.g. "hobbyist simply knows better", necessarily.
- numpad0 3y agoAlso the available resources were to be mere specifications and reference implementations. The idea was that each computer manufacturers would build their own versions to compete on the same ABI. Sure, that's how you do manually fabricate operating systems out of blank floppies. That was among the project's fatal mistakes.