If You're Going To Kill It, Open Source It

ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine is proposing big companies like Cisco and Sony consider 'open sourcing' their failed or discontinued products. The list includes Sony's AIBO and QRIO robots, IBM's Deep Blue chess computer, Ricochet Wireless, Potenco's Pull-Cord Generator, Palm, Microsoft's SPOT Watch, CISCO Flip Camera and more. MAKE is also encouraging everyone to post about what products they'd like to see open sourced."

Re:The Space Shuttle

[Rik Sweeney]

Concorde

Re:Complicated rights issues

[Yvanhoe]

You know what ? Release the code, give a liberal licence on your own copyrighted code, mention that the floating point was Walter Bright and that he reserves all rights to it.

Then if someone wants to have a complete open source implementation, they will remove this code and replace it.

Did Deep Blue cheat?

[Atari400]

I think the only way to find out would be to see if Deep Blue would make the same move again, and what the code looked like that would prompt it to do so.