In many industries open source hard-/software initiatives were not taken seriously........., initially!
After a while people in those industries have noticed that those Do It Yourself 'nerds' can offer interesting alternatives, see the software industry but the 3D printing industry as well.
Will the Open Source Community, diydrones.com (http://diydrones.ning.com/), be a threat for the established UAS industry, or will they offer interesting alternatives for the upcoming commercial market in the 'near' future?
I have posted this question on the blog of our International Civil Unmanned Aircraft System Event 2012,http://uasevent.com/2012/01/11/is-the-open-source-community-a-threa... (http://uasevent.com/2012/01/11/is-the-open-source-community-a-threat-or-a-relief-for-the-uas-industry/)
Hope to get feedback
Replies
Hi Davey and Gary,
One should not oppose against one another, as I do think that bringing the established industry and the open source industry together a lot of creativity, new insights and new business for both can start.
I have noted that when we organized the 3D printing Event, october 2011 (http://3dprintingevent.com).
I do realize that this might not be valid for the military industry, but for the commercial/civil UAS market it is valid.
It might be argued that the opensource sUAS industry is actually bigger than the established industry now Peter and that people that attend conferences are generally woefully out of date!
The main thing is that opensource projects can react quickly to new sensors and work 24 hours of the day with people being in just about every time zone.
Open Sourceis no bad thing for the industry, it makes it a lot more accessible for many and widens the user base considerably. However, Closed-source isn't bad or wrong either. I hear from too many Open Source evangelists that anything else is somehow morally bankrupt. It isn't.