@rplst8 posted:Speed Queen is a subsidiary of McGraw-Edison, which is a subsidiary of Cooper, which is owned by Eaton, which is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.
Speed Queen makes its own appliances though and isn't rebadged x. These days there are a few appliance manufacturers and they simply do what GM used t do, slap a label on a car to make it brand X (with some minor differences). GE for example is Haier (Chinese company). So basically you are buying the same appliance under a different label. Bosch is associated with Thermador and another company called Gaggenau; the difference is that with high end appliances the quality is better and the machines tend to be very different. Whirlpool own like 8 or 9 different brands. Jenn Air used to be high price and high quality, these days it is just high price IMO.
What would be really awesome is if Lionel made their original code open source, with some sort of source control. This is done in the software industry all the time, and it allows among other things improvements and bug fixes that are under source control. That doesn't mean third party products would be good, you always take your chances with third party firms, but at least we would have it.
In a sense the auto industry does this, it is why you can get parts for 25 year old cars easily (or more).
One thing I agree with those worried, if the cost of keeping old boards is such that they don't want to do it, then allowing third party firms to have access to them would make sense. They wouldn't even have to release the source code, they could simply not bother defending their patents. I think the argument that third party parts would ruin their reputation is a bit specious, if Lionel basically washes their hands of the parts for those engines then it would take an idiot to blame Lionel if it fails *shrug*. And the thing is the marketplace would take over, if you buy boards from some fly by night firm in China and they don't work, word gets out *shrug*. Ideally Lionel and MTH given their business models would license their older stuff to someone like Scott at 3rd rail (I say like Scott, simply bc I don't think a single small company could handle that). The other thing with open source is chip availability would become less of an issue, third party firms could replace custom ASICS with something that is more universal, allowing being able to more easily use off the shelf components and re-doing them if a particular part becomes obsolete.
