@Matthew.Xu@bacon
PIMAX is stepping into a competitive market for VR, their predicted hardware specifications are better than that of the competition. The area that concerns me most is they are going up against the likes of HTC who partnered with Valve have sunk massive investment into their firmware and software support and have had plenty of time to make improvements since release.
PIMAX has appealed to enthusiasts, among them are individuals who are world class talent within entertainment industry software and VR development. Many large companies have recognised the benefits of going open source:
Unity
Unity VR
Unreal Engine
AMD GPUOpen
Bringing the supporting firmware and tools into the world as open source material will make the lives easier for people like VORPX. The benefits work both ways in that PIMAX gains the benefits of access to a global pool of talent in a fast growing industry. Continued support for the tools and firmware through the open source community will extend the effective shelf life of the product.
Just to note: Here we are 3 years later and Unity is not open source in any sense of the word. You have pay a very, very, very expensive license to get access to the Unity source code (a few years ago it was something like $60,000). They’ve only open-sourced certain specific bits, that weren’t really complete, so they could get other people to do their work for them. And also note, neither Unity nor Unreal’s source code is really “open source”, because the source code they release is copyrighted and thus cannot be distributed by anyone other than Unity Technologies or Epic Games.
No pretension to educate you here… But can you give 3 big companies making hardware and using open source? emphasis on big and hardware
Some big companies like Microsoft are using open source to achieve product dissemination and in return we get free compilers.
2 successful example are Adafruit (33million Rev in 2014) and Spark Fun but both don’t make real products but devkit for enthusiasm young and old
We live in a world where a hardware company valuation is in relation to it’s IP ( intellectual property) portfolio. No IP no Money…
This is the fundamental, It’s not to say that Pimax can’t go open source but
you have to start from there. And should we note you’re only speaking of open source for the firmware
Hardware companies have a lot to gain from open source. Look at android, for instance. Pimax is going to make their money from the hardware. Poor quality drivers is one of their weaknesses. If the community can help them there, then why not?
Android is a another example of market dissemination, Google is big and wanted to increase the adoption factor and beside Android use the Linux kernel so difficult not to go open source…
Didn’t say it’s a foolish idea simply that most company will not want to open the source code vs potential but not clearly define benefits in the short term
Don’t mix up drivers and firmware. Firmware is always closed source for large commercial products and it cannot be opened for a lot of reasons (like platform SDKs supplied by component makers). Open source drivers, on another hand, could potentially benefit Pimax, especially if they won’t ever make linux drivers.
