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Data kipple and money in our hobby
#1
We suffer from a problem in this hobby: information.

The Internet is littered with what is called 'kipple'. Things that were once fresh and useful become kipple when they are hopelessly out of date and inaccurate.

Out of date documents that don't even have a publication date on them, FAQs about fast moving technologies that are out of date a week after being released, stickies in forums that have loads of dead links, blank images and incorrect or outdated information. Wikis that started off with good intentions and then died. All these things are part of the kipple that confuses and misleads countless beginners.

Writing references for a moving target is an exercise in futility unless you have a team who are good at documenting their work. While some open source projects do a better job than others with documentation, the only people who have consistently published updated, accurate and well written documentation is the Ardupilot project.

The biggest problem in this tiny, exploding part of technology is that the only people making any significant money from Betaflight and Cleanflight are the hardware manufacturers and the distributors who sell their products. Many vendors and marketplaces sell designs that are straight up copies of a hobbyist's design and take open hardware, open software and sell thousands of flight controllers and associated items without giving the person who did the hard work the time of day.

Collectively, these companies make lots and lots of money from selling flight controllers, fpv quad kits, parts and related hardware. If these companies all contributed 1% of their profits from quad related sales it could give jobs to a team of developers who could dedicate their time to Betaflight and still pay their rent. They could get paid to improve Betaflight and make it even better!

There are too many companies out there, regardless of country, who use free and open source software and hardware developed by hobbyists to drive their sales without giving a thought to the people who make these things possible. If the people who make the money continue to use free software without donating meaningfully to the community that makes it possible for them to make money, they are being selfish and greedy. The result of this will only be the end of projects like Betaflight and more illegal closed sourcing of open source projects by people with no scruples.

This is already happening extensively in the 3D printer market. Many of the 3D printers you can buy today from China use the open source project called Marlin as the code that runs their printer. They make a few changes here and there to support new features and then close the source. They don't share their changes back to the community as both good manners and the license require, they refuse to give you the code if you want to make changes to your printer - like a temperature sensor in the hot end with a different profile.
If you attempt to remind them of their legal and moral obligations under the contract that allowed them to use copyrighted software in the first place, they simply stop replying to your e-mails.

The guys who are the Marlin project contribute to it in their spare time. They don't make any significant money from it. Even so, countless manufacturers make money from their work and break the contract and moral agreement that allows them to use Marlin for free. If you make money from open source, you should consider giving some of it to the people who helped you make that money. You can't simply take the open source program, change it and then refuse to give people a copy of your changed version! It's both illegal and immoral.


tl;dr

The Internet is filling up with out of date and incorrect help for people new to our hobby. How can we encourage the businesses that use free software to sell quads, flight controllers, ESCs, motors, frames etc, to fairly donate a small proportion of their multirotor related profits to the free software projects to pay for things like accurate and up to date help and documentation like the Ardupilot project publishes on their web site?
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#2
Unfortunately I feel like it's unrealistic to expect hardware vendors to share their profits. When they are vendors like DYS who come into BF slack, ask cluelessly for existing FC schematics and also to design an FC pin mapping for them to use on their new FC - there's no hope.
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#3
Well, I am firmly of the opinion that 'govornment' is also kipple! The world is run by corporate business, and has been since the days of 'The Dutch East India Company' therefore the only vote we have is where we choose to spend our money.

"How can we encourage business to donate a proportion of their proceeds to the developers?"

How do we teach children not to be greedy? Usually by taking away what they refuse to share. Send them to bed with no supper? Put them in the naughty corner?

What do we do with greedy adults? Usually vote them into governmental positions!!

Well that was a great help Tom  Rolleyes
Windless fields and smokeless builds
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#4
I agree very much with Tom's political views... but that's another subject lol...

Right now much of the hobby's documentation is organized in blog and forum posts. While these have been incredibly useful for new people getting into the hobby they actually pose an additional barrier to entry that you're pointing out. One of the things you need to learn as you get into this hobby is how to tell the old from the recent. When you're new and everyone says that everything is moving so fast the only reference that you have for that is the youtube video that is talking about the latest and greatest motor or VTx and since it's only 4 months old it seems like that really is new and fast updating!

I think it would make sense for there to be a primary wiki. The problem is you have to build a community that people will want to contribute to and update and it has to be trusted by the larger hobby community. Once you meet those requirements then google will start picking up the content and people will start to get their questions answered based on living documents that are updated regularly.

The other problem is managing the community appropriately. If the wrong leadership manages to find its way into control it can seriously discourage contributors. Less contributors means less updates which means info is out of date still.

The only way I could see something like that happening though is if one of the big blogs like Oscar's or Propwashed were to migrate the content that most of us pretty much learned most of what we know to a wiki format and started redirecting to the wiki articles rather than the blog articles. (note to Oscar, I am not sure that you should actually do this... I like your blog as is and if others were editing your stuff I think I'd have to do some adjusting getting used to the credibility changes... so please don't take this as an actual suggestion)

Anyway... I am not sure that any of that would actually help. It could just as easily just cause more and new problems rather than fix the problems you're mentioning above.

I spent a couple of years as a Wikipedia editor myself and enjoyed my time very much. I had a few thousand "mainspace" edits and participated in a lot of the behind the scenes community work. After a while though, the politics made it frustrating and I stopped enjoying myself so I "retired" my account. So while I think it might be good it can also be discouraging too.
carl.vegas
Current Quads: Operational: Diatone GT2 200 In need of repair: Bumble Bee, tehStein,  Slightly modified Vortex 250 
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#5
(04-Nov-2017, 04:30 AM)AndreyM Wrote: Unfortunately I feel like it's unrealistic to expect hardware vendors to share their profits. When they are vendors like DYS who come into BF slack, ask cluelessly for existing FC schematics and also to design an FC pin mapping for them to use on their new FC - there's no hope.

I'm sure I'm being unrealistic, but imagine what could be done with just a tiny cut of the money that people are making off the back of Betaflight?
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#6
It's amazing how many sites you can stumble across wherein the last post in the entire forum was 6 or 7 years ago. It's like space debris
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#7
I totally agree unseen about how quickly information in this hobby can become outdated Smile
I now spend more time updating/correcting info on my blog than writing new posts LOL Big Grin it's the sad side of this industry!
Don't be a LOS'er, be an FPV'er :)  My Gear - Facebook - Instagram - Twitter
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#8
You're one of the few who does Oscar!
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