Any idea what happened to DIY drones community ?

it looks like , There seems to be some politics going on . Chris Anderson now has commercial interests by floating the http://3drobotics.com/ !! ?  Wonder if HK Pilot 2.5 accelerated commercial interest !!  

I guess so as Chris has set up completely different site for the 2.6 and I am an unhappy customer of the airspeed sensor pitot tubes

Intention made  Much clearer

Open source community must be sulking !! They wrote code now This guy makes money !

How is that guy making money out of the firmware because even now everything is open source, you can still use/modify the arducopter/rover/pilot firmware. He hasnt yet made it closed source. Even full details of hardware (apm 2.x)are available so that anyone can build it from scratch.

He is making money by selling hardware but so is HK, RC timer and other manufacturers who are making apm clones,but none of them charge you for the firmware or shouldn't because its open source. 3dr charges a premium because they are covering r&d costs that goes into making FC's & hardware as stated by them.

Point taken

Totally disagree with you Sidewinder. I saw similar thing done by Redhat to Linux, something Richard Stallman warned about when I got a lifetime oppertunity to spend a whole day with him.

Chris gathered all the OSS/GPL community's ground work and closed the source from APM 2.6 onwards. I know folks in the Indian defence industry crying foul as they invested and contributed to this inexpensive platform for their rapid prototyping test and now in lurch.

You think they earn coz of Hardware ? So wrong !! Remember most of the Software companies are way richer than the hardware companies as royalty from Copy of software has no Input cost when cost of R&D is settled , in Chris's case bulk of it came from community. So American model of business - Attaché then Revenue

I really don't see it. Redhat / Chris Anderson may close source a particular branch, but the community can continue in whatever direction they want, just like business as before. They just need to identify new leadership and move on. People who commercialize open source (ala Redhat or Chris Anderson) actually pay for people who work full time on critical bugs, important features and most importantly, they sign legal documents vouching for results of the product they sell, which cannot be done without a good revenue model to pay for full time attention of the contributors involved.

Regardless of what Stallman thinks, Redhat has really helped businesses to use Linux with confidence, either via RHEL as the paid option, or inadvertently by making downstream distros like CentOS possible.

I cannot understand what has Chris/3DR closed exactly? Pixhawk 2.4.3 is the successor of APM 2.6, and that too is open source. You can DIY you own Pixhawk, infact clones are already available. Can you point us where has he closed source for the hardware or firmwares yet? Yes the guy has commercialized the work of community but then so have other manufacturers. But why is it that only 3DR is being roasted for it.

We can debate over it once he goes that way but as of now I cant see anything that points out that he has closed sourced anything.

Infact a couple of days ago, they introduced a OTP certification check on Pixhawak via GCS but that wont have anything to do with closed source as of yet. GCS is open source and you can fork out one without it if you like to! Its a nasty move from 3DR which would discourage new buyers from getting clone Pixhawk but workarounds have already surfaced. You can read more regarding that

http://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/drones-discuss/N4G2GkA72r8

Ps: Cant embed the link properly.

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