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Hoboken, NJ vs. Giant Parking Robot
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Aug 08, 2006 12:01 PM
from the their-mouths-are-still-moving dept.
from the their-mouths-are-still-moving dept.
markwalling writes "Wired News is running a story about Hoboken, New Jersey's battles with robotic parking. A legal battle over the license had shut down the garage, essentially trapping hundreds of cars inside. Bill Coats has recommended that the parking garage be run off open source software: 'Vendees are going to become more sophisticated in the deals they enter into.' Coats even sees this as a driver of open source software. 'If you can get (open source software) you can't be shut down.' But that's harder to do in highly custom applications."
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All Your Cars Are Belong To Us (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All Your Cars Are Belong To Us (Score:5, Insightful)
--
An elevator can only go up and down, but the Wonkavator can go sideways and slantways and longways and backways... and squareways and front ways and any other ways that you can think of.
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Re:All Your Cars Are Belong To Us (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:All Your Cars Are Belong To Us (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say it's a rather good design - for the vendor. What gives them more leverage, an empty garage or a garage full of trapped vehicles?
Ahh... Capitalism.
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Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Er...BECAUSE it's open source, it's easier to customize. That's one of the major selling points.
Maybe someone missed that memo.
Subject change; This company is based in Clearwater, FL. Anybody else get a sneaking suspicion that this has something to do with scientology?
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that the more custom it is, the more similar the proprietary and open-source development methods become. If the software is completely custom, paying an open-source developer to do it is exactly the same as paying a proprietary developer. The only difference is who gets what rights at the end.
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Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Not really (Score:5, Funny)
What?
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Except it isn't (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you get the idea that Joe is a complete cretin by now? Does it invoke thoughts along the lines of, "nobody can be _that_ stupid, dude. Everyone would know it doesn't work that way," perchance?
Because that's a literal analogy for what those guys tried to do with the robotics software. What Joe in my example does with the house, the municipality official did with the software. Literally.
The municipality basically _could_ have paid to develop the software and the garage from scratch (F/OSS or not), but I'd bet that it would have been a lot more expensive, took longer, and ran a non-zero risk of ending up over-budget and dragging for years past the deadline, leaving you with a garage that doesn't work. And I really mean a _lot_ longer, because you also have to thoroughly test it, review the code, etc, to be sure it doesn't do something extremely stupid. (E.g., you don't want it to malfunction and move an elevator while a car is only half-way in it, destroying the car in the process.) At that point, you can probably have it GPL'ed or whatever, since you paid for it from scratch.
Or you could do what they did, and buy an _almost_ off-the-shelf solution for a fraction of the price. (Yes, it's not "off the shelf" in the sense of buying it at Wal Mart like you could buy a copy of Office, but still, an existing solution. Or at least something that only needs some small changes, as opposed to starting from scratch.) At which point, you get to take whatever the heck license you can get for those money.
Furthermore, presumably to save some money, they only rented that software for X years. Then when the deadline went, the municipality basically thought "muahahaha, why pay some more when we already have the software? Look at all the money we could save by running the software without a license. Let's shaft the developpers instead." And they even literally call the cops to kick the developper's employees off the premises.
Which, sorry, is just unethical and stupid. I can't feel any empathy for them in that kind of situation.
Furthermore, then when the software stopped working without a valid license, they tried to villify the developpers in the media, as well as drag them to court. As if they had some sacred/constitutional right to run a garage with stolen software, and the developpers were such monsters to deny them this opportunity.
Does it sound like complete slimeballs by now? Because it sure as heck does to me. Imagine that someone ignores your license (GPL or whatever floats your boat), and then they sue _you_, and try to paint _you_ as some monster to the media for trying to enforce your license. That kind of complete sleazeballs.
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Re:Except it isn't (Score:5, Interesting)
Joe rents his house. It has a garage. One day, when I'm over at Joe's new place, I leave my car in his garage for a few days. Joe says its OK. I even pay him in beers for letting me park it there. All is well.
Then Joe's landlord evicts him and changes all the locks on the doors, including the garage. Later on, I arrive at the house, only to find it locked up and my car still inside. When I ask Joe about this, he referrs me to the landlord.
So I go to the landlord, and ask to be able to retrieve my car. The landlord refuses. When pressed on this matter he goes on and on about his property rights, waving his deed to the property about in front of everyone declaring that he is under no obligation to open any door on his property for anyone. It's his door. Joe was only leasing it from him, and now that Joe's gone, he's not opening it without payment from Joe. Joe's not paying.
You can see that the landlords property rights are conflicting with my own. If he has his way, he can essentially annex my car using his property rights. I can't get my car out without breaking the law, and any court I go to will take months to reach a judgement, and will end up costing me more than the car. I'm better off paying whatever extortion the landlord demands.
Now, instead of the Landlords property rights, what we're seeing here is one companies intellectual property rights being held over the actual property rights of people whos cars are being held to ransom. Robotic Parking have stolen the cars of the people who parked in the garage and are using them to extort the city of Hoboken. If I tried this, I'd get ten, maybe fifteen years. If a software company tries it, they'll get a big fat payoff.
There is nothing those car owners can do. They have no rights whatsoever, and will not be getting their property back until two third parties agree, which may take weeks. They can't even protest. The city is too well protected. The company is too well protected. The garage design makes it impossible for them to organise and remove the cars. Robotic Parking has accomplished what the French could never dream of realising. The mob has been made impotent.
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Re:Pictures? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Pictures? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.robopark.com/ [robopark.com]
Looking at the site you posted, it looks like the cars are stacked on top each other, with nothing in between (or if there is anything, you can't see it. I'd sure hate to have someone's clunker dripping oil onto my windshield.
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Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you misconstrued his point. He's not saying it's harder to customize open source apps, he's saying it's harder to get highly customized apps under an open source model. Companies that spend lots of time and monel developing the highly customized software might be less inclined to make it OSS since it gives them (the developers) very little benefit in exchange for exposing a highly valuable codebase.
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Gov't runs them off... then complains?! (Score:5, Insightful)
And then complains because it breaks?
Well, it has to be said (Score:4, Funny)
Locking cars - Locking documents (Score:5, Insightful)
Substitute cars with documents and "robotic parking lot" with DRM and you have the same result.
Do we really want to be held up for ransom by some company that has locked our data into their container ?
See also this article where vital information is held up if you do not pay... the point is that it is my data, not somebody else data !!!! as if since I put some money in the bank then the bank can refuse to give my money back or to stop moving to another bank. (I hope I am not giving new ideas to banks here...)
The article on locking medical data is here [freesoftwaremagazine.com]
Hoboken What? (Score:5, Funny)
Bad business decision by Robotic Parking... (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely, positively NOBODY with a gram of sanity is going to want to do business with them going forward. Smart move, guys.
The SMART way to timebomb the software (if it truly had to be done) would have been to program a soft landing... enabling the removal of cars already in the garage without restriction, and maybe even allowing new cars to be parked, but adding progressively longer delays (with obvious system messages, like "Delaying for 90 seconds due to software license expiration") to give the garage's owners time to digest the situation and react. Progressively annoying someone into action is one thing... holding them ransom with a metaphorical gun to their head is another matter entirely. I wouldn't be HAPPY with the former, but I'd be positively OUTRAGED over the latter.
Re:A who did what to who? (Score:5, Informative)
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NOT Thievery. (Score:4, Insightful)
Like the garage itself, this software company has costs, too. There are wages, benefits, a building, taxes, and everything else that a business needs to survive.
It matters not if the city can afford it-- they agreed to it, then threw the guys out. Now it's a matter for civil litigation.
Who needs to be responsible for this gaffe? The city attorneys. I'll be I know what law school they went to, too.
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Re:NOT Thievery. (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't tell you the number of jobs we've done where we didn't get paid. Some required litigation. Others required logic bombs. When they litigated, we've won 100% of the cases, and counterclaimed for legal fees and won 100% of those, too. I don't like litigation. It sucks. So does NOT PAYING YOUR LEGAL OBLIGATIONS.
We get paid for what we do. We get to PICK OUR OWN CHARITIES. And we do charity work, about 4% of what we do each year goes to 501c(3) and 501c(6). We picked them, and they like us. That's how it works.
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Re:Thievery (Score:5, Insightful)
That does not sound unreasonable. Thought it would depend on how big the garage is, how many cars per day, and the daily parking rate, $5500/month actually sounds rather inexpensive to me. To your other point, you would be hard pressed to find a full-time developer for $66K (fully burdened- including salary, health plan, sick days, 401k, etc.).
It's more than just development cost - think of the testing required. Because this is dealing with automobiles, which are most folks' second most valuable asset, the system has to be extremely reliable. That reliablity doesn't just happen. It requires planning, coding, testing to a much higher degree than the latest open source mp3 ripper. It doesn't necessarily come cheap. A vendor must be able to recoup its costs and make a profit, or else you won't get innovative solutions like this anymore.
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Re:Thievery (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on what? Do you know if they charged anything for the software up front? Perhaps the operators of the garage preferred to consider the software as part of their monthly overhead instead of as a large up-front purchase. And most likely they get some sort of NON-billed support time as part of that monthly tab. There's probably some other services tangled up in that, too - like off-site backups and mirroring.
When it somes down to brass tacks, this $5500 fee was cooked up arbitrarily by the Robotic.
What, but, say... $2500 would not have been arbitrary? How do you know that their closest competition isn't very close in price because of the costs and the business model? Do you consider your salary or hourly rate to be arbitrary?
That works out to $66,000 a year. They could pay their own devel to make software to keep that place running AND add new functionality as needed
No way. Not even close. Unless you're saying that $66k would pay for ALL of the overhead of keeping that person around. Salary. Benefits. Infrastructure. Dev platform. Backups. Documentation. And if so, the net take-home for a person whose entire overhead is $66k would be about $25k, tops. Is that the person that you think is going to be able to live in the mid-Atlantic area and, with good worldly experience, be trusted to keep that system in good shape, let along change it? Even if you could hire such a person for so little, why on earth would they stay? And then you have the cost of training and replacing and retaining someone else. $66k doesn't even come close.
don't think it's not cost effective to have in-house development in this case.
Start factoring in the disruptive costs of losing/firing someone, of mitigating risk so that only one person isn't dealing with the code that moves cars around and deals with people's money, and I think that's actually exactly wrong. I say this from the perspective of having been on both ends of buying/providing coding and integration services, and of being a consultant on projects before, during, and after all of this stuff finally gets looked at (by the end users) with a rational eye. There's more to it than you think.
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Funny you should mention Transformers (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:should be easier (Score:5, Funny)
Thankyou, thankyou, I'll be here all week, try the veal...
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