Hey guys,
Let me start by saying this could be a really long conversation, and so I will skim.
Having worked in open source hardware communities of varying flavours for years now, I supposed I have become somewhat jaded by what I see as users generally taking a lot without giving much (if anything) back. By this I mean people downloading files you work hard to produce, often critisising them (and you) feircly when they discover some kind of error or fault, and never (not once in my experience) improving these creations and sharing them back. Beyond this, there are so many “commitments” from people to work on things, and almost zero follow through.
Even this community for example was interested in recieving an audio recorder at some point to help gather data. There wasn’t follow through, and thus energy wasted once again. After a while this becomes exhausting.
But this is all ok if you’re working on a project for fun, as a hobby (as I suspect you guys are? Correct me if I am wrong). But when this is your full time job, and you are giving away so much, and reciving so little in return, let alone financial stability, the open source philosophy becomes an empty concept, one that causes it’s creators to suffer, rather than thrive. One cannot survive on a ideology.
So yes, we have not open sourced the classification algorythm. Why? Because there are a growing number of companies doing this, who will be eager to take our work, close it, build on it, sell it, and give us nothing in return. We cannot continue to work in this way, how could we? We have families and bills.
Still, all the beehives remain open source, and we will soon be releasing the BuzzBoard, which is an os version of BuzzBox onto which you can add your own sensors. The data will be open as a user opt-in. We have not gone “completely corporate”.
In conclusion, I hope you guys can appreciate that this wasn’t a desicion we took lightly. It was one built on years of experience, and coming to terms with the reality of living in a capitalistic world. Perhaps an OS economy is still possible, and projects like ours were originally, will be able to thrive. But in order for that to work, people need to change their attitudes and commitment levels towards the cause.