No Surprises Here Then...

Actually, this might be a bit low. I don't travel without my nano.

10%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Columbus Dating

For FOSS sake...

After various discussions and sub-threads, I've some questions for people of the FOSS persurasion about how it would work in my business.  Actually, it would help a lot as we are currently making our applications Open Source, but, here's the thing, we can't even give them away...  (more on that later).

Questions:
1. How is initial development funded of a product/driver/solution - for example, a typical drivers pack for a mobile phone takes between 9-12 months to go from reference code to an industrialised product that would be acceptable to an end operator.  Typically that will peak at about 22 people at the half way point, and have 3 months testing.  Normally a single driver after a PCB change or similar takes 2-3 months to integrate into hardware and test.  Where does the money come from?  Or rather, how does this work in the FOSS model?  Is this still an NRE hit the OEM or Silicon Vendor has to take?

2. How do you deal with IOT testing?  Two examples; MMS and Bluetooth - before you can ship either product on a carrier they'll ask for pretty extensive (read expensive and utter PITA) IOT testing on leading MMS-Cs (message routers) and/or leading Bluetooth equipment.  This usually ends up with a whole pile of hot fixes being done to code just before product launch and, occasionally, patches coming out for the BT stack later.  For this you need access to labs and specialist equipment.  How would this work?  If at all?

3. How do you address harware/software comflicts?  This might be a core architectual problem, but here's an example. H.264 codecs, there's usually a hardware codec on the silicon for this, but the API isn't always easy to use, plus hardware codecs often are single threaded from an architectural point of view.  This sort of thing will probably go away, but not in the next few years because it's a long winded process to build silicon, test and sell it.

4. Who decides what gets done and what doesn't get done?  In the consumer goods market where you're working to 1-2 product launch points a year, you have to have your stuff finished and ready to launch in time for set dates.    Sure, the OEM could do this and pick up fixes and so on from the public domain, but are there really enough people working on the critical things?  Or do people tend to work on the things that interest them?  Which is it?


Oh, giving stuff away.  We've recently got out of the products business, it's a long story, the right decision blah blah, and we've moved to providing it on an Open Source basis with a one off license for support if needed.  The thing is, we're actually struggling against commercial software.  People want guarentees that features will be in and working and don't want to have to pay for them themselves.