Chris Anderson on drones and open source hardware | Hacker News Reader

Chris Anderson on drones and open source hardware

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58 pointsdmix10 comments

I heard this guy talk at DEFCON once, explaining how great he was at leveraging free work force from "opensource people" in order to make his company a success.

The way he worded that and how he only talked about that (almost nothing technical, more of a how did my business succeed story), made me basically dislike him forever :P

I felt like he was throwing himself flowers for having found a way to get ppl to do the hard work for him. Which isn't how i see open source. :/

Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysyYKPa9Rcg

Well, this guy is Chris Anderson. The same guy who wrote The Long Tail, Free, was Wired editor for more than a decade, and wrote about the hardware and maker movement well before IoT became mainstream.

His company created DIY Drones [1], and heavily supports ArduPilot [2], paying developers to actively contribute to the project (either through benefits, physical goods, or even equity). He's certainly not your typical business guy, trying "to get [open source] people to do the hard work for him". Chris has been involved and contributing in meaningful ways for decades, either as a thought leader, a writer, entrepreneur, or contributing to the open source community.

Several other large businesses were created on top of open source communities, and have a symbiotic relationship with the community. MakerBot started as a clone of Rep Rap. Arduino was created on top of Processing IDE. Amazon AWS wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Xen. Raspberry Pi was created on top of Linux. I feel it's exactly the same with 3D Robotics (or better; e.g., MakerBot's contribution is highly controversial).

Having said that, I agree that his profile and this talk wasn't a good fit for DEFCON. It'd be a better fit for Solid, or other O'Reilly conference.

[1] http://diydrones.com/ [2] http://ardupilot.com/

Manufacturing and selling drones commercially is also fraught with ethical issues (a significant portion of the market is defence and related surveillance applications). Not something I'd get involved with, though this guy apparently has no qualms.

Yup... the same guy that once proclaimed "the Web is dead".

(OT) I am given the idea that popping up a banner soliciting an address for e-mail updates (as this site does) is a standard practice on many blogging platforms, and that it is apparently quite effective at retaining users, but as a user I find it quite obnoxious. I opened this page in a new tab, and when I clicked over to it I did not immediately recall what the page was about. The 'close' button is also small and hard to see.

I purposely avoid subscribing to e-mail updates because I get very little to nothing out of them that I could not also get elsewhere, e.g. through an RSS reader, at my own convenience or intent. E-mail updates almost always read to me as advertisement, similar to dead tree junk mail.

Compounding this annoyance, though this is squarely in the realm of my own responsibility, I configure my browsers to clear cookies every user session. So doing allows me to easily be logged out of services simply by closing my browser and has the side benefit of perhaps confounding tracking services just a little bit. Unfortunately it also means that any of these websites which I visit very rarely will display the subscription pop-up every time.

I'm curious about their stance on hardware clones such as Hobbyking, RCTimer, etc.

Being an open source company, do they embrace this? I've seen some pretty harsh words spoken on various forums from 3dr employees towards people asking about clones.

Having heard some talks from 3D Robotics people and followed them online, I get the sense that they (officially, as an organization) accept the clones as competition and simply try to continue innovating to stay ahead of the game. That sentiment is exemplified in this blog post: http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/05/19/cloned-open-source-h...

That being said, I think it is natural for there to be some animosity towards the clones on a more individual basis, especially in a situation where community members and employees feel that they are expected to provide support for the clones.

I wonder how much of the £30m series B they got finds its' way back to the open source community who made arducopter

I have a 3DR drone and it's pretty good. Their community website could be better. DJI is still kicking their ass in some respects

I'm glad the birdman beat that kiddy porn rap.

It'll probably be slightly offensive to him, but every time I read "Chris Anderson", I think of "Gerry Anderson"... It takes me a couple seconds to drop into the right mental context and shed the futuristic images off my mind.

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