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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