A&L Enterprises Tech Line

Fascinating item I heard on Floss Weekly the other day – about the JMRI project.  In this episode they interview Bob Jacobsen about his experience defending JMRI – an open source project for the model railroading community.  This was fascinating for me as I like the concept of Open Source, love model trains and standing up for the little guy.

What happened was Bob Jacobsen, along with others, created the JMRI project – a Java interface to the decoders used in model trains – interacting with DCC decoders  - which use an open protocol.  What’s neat about the DCC system is that – since it’s a standard – I can buy decoders from one manufacturer (the thing that goes in the train) and the control system from another manufacturer.  This means that if I buy a train from a manufacturer with a decoder built-in I can use that on both mine and my friend’s layout – even if our control system (the throttles, etc.) are not from the same manufacturer.  This is a great example of an industry working together for the best good – as there is a both healthy competition without losing the ability for items to work together.  In fact now the really cool thing is sound on the trains itself – which increases the realism greatly (and is just fun!).

The story was about how someone decided, in my opinion, to abuse the work that community had done and take it for their own (wholesale copying open source code into a commercial product and removing the copyright notices).  This person (the whole history is here) sued the people in the open source project for ridiculous sums of money (especially considering they didn’t derive revenue from it) and took actions to threaten their primary income. View full article »