What's To Stop Copycats?


You seem to be confused, it is NOT open hardware. There is an invitation to solder to labeled points on the board, but that has nothing to do with open hardware.

IF some crazy company could knock this off they would need to build their own complete board. (I bet you the first company to do this will use a BeagleBoard, or beagleboard ripoff, and make it look like a Pandora while being more in line with Eeepc size.)
 
Exactly what parts of Open Pandora is protected and what is open source?

I am a bit confused about this.
Everywhere I go I see the words 'Open Source' but no explanation about for what parts or under which license.
 
craigix said:
If they could pull it off we would probably email them asking how they managed to do it cheaper than us!
Heh... There you have it from the horse's mouth, folks. And if they tell you Craig, let me know what they did, I'd be all ears and would want to know too... ;) :D
 
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Under what license is the software open source?
How may it be used/reused and modified?
 
If the copycats were decent quality and ran the same software, then it would suck for craigix, but it would be great for us consumers.
 
VRAndy said:
If the copycats were decent quality and ran the same software, then it would suck for craigix, but it would be great for us consumers.
Good thing they won't be decent quality, then? ;)

See: Arduino. Yeah, you can buy an Arduino from china for $10, but you may encounter odd unexplainable errors that cause you day-long headaches trying to fix. I'd be happier with one from the US for $35.
 
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denli said:
Under what license is the software open source?
How may it be used/reused and modified?
Main OS is Linux based so license is GPL (v2 I believe).
 
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Game_over said:
The most that will happen, is that they knock off the case layout (the case design is already pretty common) make it a bit smaller, and go the usual PMP with one emulator route.

//Off topic statement: Yeah OBAMA!!!! It's cold out here.

But this always happens so no worries.

Take that to the off-topic board please, no need to hear your political bullshit.
 
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Welcome to the wonderful world of open source. There is no real way to lock anything down. So its a crap shoot.

The PCB could be knocked off before it is even released. Theres only one way to wire up an OMAP. The only guess is what I/O were use for the controls and keyboard which can be figured out by looking at the firmware.

However the Chinese won't mess with something unless they can sell 10,000 or a more a month.
 
CandidStan said:
Game_over said:
The most that will happen, is that they knock off the case layout (the case design is already pretty common) make it a bit smaller, and go the usual PMP with one emulator route.

//Off topic statement: Yeah OBAMA!!!! It's cold out here.

But this always happens so no worries.

Take that to the off-topic board please, no need to hear your political bullshit.

:rolleyes: that's just a statement I was at the inauguration when I typed that out. I don't have any political bullshit, leave a mods job to a moderator please ;).


Anyway's, nubie's right in some facets, it's an open "platform". Overall, while a 1:1 clone with several of it's key components included is not possible, a clone asthmatic wise is almost inevitable once the console catches fire.
 
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The original team hasn't even figured out how to make these in quantity yet and the big worry is copy cats???

I think the bigger concern is competing against some of the new products coming out. When the Pandora was annouced it was a breakthrough concept... when it actually ships (to be determined) how special will it actually be?

I know I'm being a naysayer, but to spend any time pondering copy cats when there isn't an original cat is laughable.
 
^Copydogs are worthless and unoriginal. Just put a javascript snippet on every openpandora page to make a popup window whenever one right clicks, or just use bad HTML to stop consecutive sentence copy/pasting. That'll stop those dirty, low-down copycats, the same ones who keep trying to quote snippets of Snopes articles!
 
Mweston stated that for this reason the gerber files will not be published. From hardware perspective the hardest work is to make a decent layout (together with using decent parts of course) that is stable and works.

So, while they might be able to copy the idea, they can't duplicate this without a lot of effort.
An other factor is that the production process (it uses very small parts) is pretty advanced, not something any cheap MP3 maker can do - note that i'm not saying that NO Chinese maker could do it, but it's not common yet.

One thing that could more "easily" (take this with a lot of salt) be done is making a compatible device, using bigger form factor or so, assuming they can get their hands on the chips from TI - which for the moment I doubt.

For the "open" part this is what been promised:
* hardware: information on every connection available and no obscuring on what chips are used. aka , you can "hack in" the system on hardware level because you know what each thing is supposed to be/do.
* software: no restriction on what OS you can run and information about the boot process. aka, you are free to run whatever OS you fancy, assuming you can code/port/compile it for this platform yourself or have some people do it for you.....

The license of the OS is in fact irrelevant, just because you can choose what os to run (unlike for example Iphone where Apple does it's best to make it impossible to run anything besides their "OSX for Iphone"), if that happen to be a GPL (or similar) system, then fine. But if someone would want to make a closed source OS for the pandora then that's also fine. If you happen to have the source code of windows laying around then theoretically you could even port this (of course it would be illegal and a major task to get that stuff ported to arm - but just saying to make a point here).
 
They won't be able to get the analogue nubs either, since they are custom made and nothing like them exists anywhere else.
 
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