@Rider Sandman posted:Honest questions: Why would Lionel ever do that? Why would they ever give away their technology for nothing in return?
- To support hobbyists
- To garner goodwill from customers
- To foster innovation
Aftermarket programs often involve quality control requirements on the part of the OEM since the aftermarket product interacts with the OEM product/system. Why would Lionel want the headache of policing an aftermarket program on an antiquated system they are choosing to no longer support?
Who said anything about policing or supporting it? Open source software licenses have no warranty and typically indemnify the author from liability.
I, too, am an IP lawyer and agree with the very well articulated analysis from Chaos. Like him, I also find it unlikely that Lionel - a relatively small company with limited resources - would spend any meaningful effort to enforce their remaining IP rights, if any, in regard to technologies they are choosing to abandon, especially if the competitive product is fairly/properly reverse engineered. I also find it unlikely that they’ll denounce any remaining rights in the form of some omnibus license - their current designs may still have evolutions of the original source code.
Nothing says they have to release the enhancements as well. If you don’t think they’d pursue legal options, why not help out their customers?
To me, the barrier to producing replacement products is likely more commercial than legal. If there was still good money to be made producing them, Lionel would probably do so and they could certainly do so less expensively than someone starting from scratch.
My $0.02 worth and it may not be worth $0.02…..
I dunno, it’s never been as easy as it is now to prototype electronics and have them made overseas. It’s a maker economy and as we’ve seen there are many people on this forum who are extremely capable.
Being free of legal liabilities would likely entice more activity in that regard.
