First time subsurace usage surprises

Jef Driesen jefdriesen at telenet.be
Wed Aug 1 14:44:52 PDT 2012


On 2012-08-01 02:05, Lutz Vieweg wrote:
> On 08/01/2012 01:48 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> Some day in the future I hope we'll see something like bluetooth and
>> inductive charging. Standard communication protocols, no pins, nasty
>> battery changes.

Bluetooth is already being used by the Heinrichs Weikamp Frog and 
Shearwater Predator. They are both using the Bluetooth Serial Port 
Profile (SPP/RFCOMM), which makes it easy to support them with the 
existing serial api's.

> ... and the next day you awake and notice that Apple just sued the
> manufacturer of that dive computer out of business because its round
> knobs vaguely resembled some of theirs :-(
>
> To me it seems that today even companies which would theoretically be
> willing to hand out information on their hardware don't dare to do 
> so,
> because that would invite their competitors to sue them over trivial 
> patents.

I don't think this is an issue with dive computers. They only need to 
document the communication protocol and the data format for the logbook. 
I can't imagine how there can be any intellectual property worth 
protecting there. After all it's just some dive data logged by the user. 
We are not talking about publishing the decompression algorithms or 
anything like that.

I strongly believe providing documentation and supporting third-party 
applications is actually an advantage. Dive computer manufacturers make 
their money from selling hardware, not software. Having good third-party 
applications and cross-platform support may in fact result in more 
satisfied customers and an increase of their sales!

Luckily some manufacturers start to see this.

Jef



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