On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 2:36 PM, Mats Eriksson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am seeing the OpenMoko project as the first serious project to develop > hardware in "bazaar-style" fashion. A personal dream would like to build > a "OpenCar" in "bazaar-style" fashion in the future.
Other "open car" projects have been pointed out, and there is also evproduction.org which is sortof a community design effort but not 100% open (mostly because one guy is doing most of the work, he was hoping to make a profit on the production, and the "community" has not done very much). A car is just such a big project... While code can be copied at nearly zero cost, cars are neither cheap nor easy to replicate, and by the time it's driveable, a great deal of the work must be done; the "pieces" are not useful by themselves. There are regulatory issues and liability issues. If you spend thousands to replicate a car from that design, and then see that the design is marginal, you feel disappointed about having spent so much money and/or fabrication time, and not having gotten something useful. Every improvement takes more money. But past the threshold of usefulness, maybe the community would participate more in smaller incremental improvements. (Just like Linus did not post to Usenet until he had something working and useful, and then people got excited and started helping very quickly. And just like OpenMoko did not release a phone a piece-at-a-time; the hardware had to be workable before it could be sold.) The guy who started that one has run into some financial and logistical problems and is willing to sell the project as a ready-to-go business: there is a allegedly a first-pass driveable design, and it's just a matter of starting production. If you have a little money to invest and are serious about doing that, you can take over that project, release every aspect of the design as fully open-source, and make money by selling parts, kits and/or complete cars. (Disclaimer: I'm one of the "community" that hasn't contributed much; I do not know any of the others very well, have not seen any physical results of the project in-person, and do not stand to profit from any of the operations, but I agree with you that this sort of thing ought to be done.) _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community