Carnal Reason

Sony works hard to keep users from hacking PSP units they bought and paid for. Their motto: you bought it, we own it. Lego chose the road less traveled.

Within weeks of the original Mindstorms debut, a Stanford graduate student named Kekoa Proudfoot reverse engineered the RCX brick and posted all of his findings, including detailed information on the brick’s underlying firmware, online. Several other engineers quickly used Proudfoot’s revelations to design their own Mindstorms tools, including an open source operating system (LegOS) and a C-like programming alternative to RCX-code (Not Quite C, or NQC). Lego’s Danish brain trust soon realized that their proprietary code was loose on the Internet and debated how best to handle the hackers. “We have a pretty eager legal team, and protecting our IP is very high on its agenda,” Nipper says. Some Lego executives worried that the hackers might cannibalize the market for future Mindstorms accessories or confuse potential customers looking for authorized Lego products.

After a few months of wait-and-see, Lego concluded that limiting creativity was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity. Besides, the hackers were providing a valuable service. “We came to understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting,” Nipper says. “It’s a totally different business paradigm - although they don’t get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have with the basic Mindstorms set.” Rather than send out cease and desist letters, Lego decided to let the modders flourish; it even wrote a “right to hack” into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild.
Wired

Lego wants to be the iPod of recreational robotics. If you have any robot building geek inside you, check it out. Lego is based in Denmark, a country under assault by crazed superstitious savages for daring to permit free speech. Send the Danes a little love, buy a robot.

Posted on February 4th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: General