Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] group submarine designing - good or bad.

["Steven Mills" <barycenter@earthlink.net>]

Ian has echoed some of my sentiments, too.

Open Source does not necessarily mean non-commercial.
Perhaps," in the" or "for" *public domain* might be a close term?
And there very well could be legal ramifications here even
if caveats and disclaimers were in place.   Most products on
the market have warnings and disclaimers, but that does not
immune them from lawsuits.

As far as projects go, I've been involved in both business and
non-commercial projects that fizzled-out due to many reasons :
family and financial crisis, disagreements, withering interests,
procrastination...etc. If a group/project coordinator were to face
a family crisis or personal problem that would cause him to
bow-out, this alone could crash the program. We all need to
stay on top of things and have a sense of the project so it does
not falter if anyone one or more person(s) has to step out.

If there was a similar project here on pSubs then we need to ask
and know why it hasn't been completed so we can avoid the
pitfalls.

I realize this is just in the discussion stage and nothing has been
laid in stone. But lets not allow our excitement and exhuberance
overshadow prudence and common sense.

I'm not trying to be a pill here or dampen matters, but the devil
is in the details...or something to that effect.

--Steve



----- Original Message -----
From: Ian Roxborough <irox@ix.netcom.com>
To: <personal_submersibles@psubs.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 12:10 PM
Subject: [PSUBS-MAILIST] group submarine designing - good or bad.


>
>
> "non commercial" vs open source.
>
> If it's "non commericial" then I don't see how it's open source.
> There is no open source project that says you can not use it
> for commerical use.  They are plenty of projects that provide
> a "not for commerical use" version, sometimes with source code,
> but this isn't an open source project and calling it an open
> source project would dilute the (already over loaded) term
> "open source".  - just my 2 cents.
>
>
> Group submarine project.
>
> Wasn't there a couple of people (from this list?) who tried to
> design a submarine together and after 3 years still had not
> finish the specs stage?  (I heard this third hand so I could
> be wrong).
>
> I'm not saying this is a bad idea, although the energy might
> be better spent focusing on more specific areas of submarine
> design, such as a motor control circuit (I remember Ken Martindale
> posted Motor Controller Schematic
http://www.psubs.org/pic/motorcontrol.html),
> or a trim tank control system, or Auto-Hover depth control like the
> sport sub, or a black box dive recorded, or nice way of controlling
> a spot lights direction from within the submarine.... etc..
> I.e. things that are really useful to the submarine building
> community.
>
>
> K-350 vs open source.
>
> I don't recall George Kittredge open sourcing his K-350
> design, which means that we don't have permission to create
> works derived from any of Kittredge designs and then give
> the plans away for free.  We could produce designs that
> could be used with a K class, "Auto-hover depth control for
> you K-250", but not redesign a K class and then give the
> plans away.  I don't think anybody here would buy all the
> rights for the K class off George and then open source it
> either.
>
>
> Talking vs work.
>
> I'm interesting in being a part of this idea, but not
> until I see that real progress is possible.  I'm also
> not convinced that it is a good idea to be a psubs
> project, and that it may open psubs.org up to more
> liability than the people running it would wish.
>
>
> Ian.