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[PleoPet]

Open Letter - For anyone associated with the rebirth of Pleo:

I won't bore you with my back-story, except for this short summary: I fought with the UGOBE people for a long time to get them to release and open source many things. I lost the argument. I couldn't even get them to release the finished PDK to the public. I lost the argument. The company went belly up. The new company has finally released a ~2 year old PDK. That's a good start but not enough.
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My terminology:
The main Pleo firmware is in 3 parts.

The main personality "PLEOPM", written in Pawn with associated resources and interpreted with the main ARM CPU.
The main ARM program, written in "C" and compiled for the main ARM CPU. Usually called "LifeOS"
The head ARM program, written in "C"/assembler for the secondary ARM CPU. Important for sound detection and other things.

In the UGOBE company, these are all CLOSED SOURCE. They didn't trust their paying customers enough to share with them their Intellectual Property.
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IANAL but I assume the new company bought all Intellectual Property rights to this firmware.
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So my plea to the new owners:

You should be able to release everything open source, now.
Please release everything open source, as soon as it is convenient.

Please start with "PLEOPM", then LifeOS and for advanced programmers the head ARM CPU firmware.

That would send a strong signal to the Pleo owner community that you hoping for a new start and abandoning the stupid decisions of the old administration.
The Pleo has great potential. Please don't let it die another premature death.

--PleoPet (http://aibohack.com/pleo)

[justbede]

I shoulds probably be posting this somewhere else but... welcome to the forums PleoPet it's good to see more people with genuine interest in expanding Pleo's abillities. Oh yeah you have my support on the opening up of Pleo and love the site.

[PleoPet]

I agree, please tell me where to post it???

The EULA for the Pleo PDK is terrible (from the old company) with many legal complications.
Please see this post ( http://bobthepleo.com/forums/index.php?topic=876.0 )

[DragonGirl]

Yes, I agree with you for the most part, but I do understand the desire to protect what
they have.

They think they have software and hardware.  I think they are wrong.  I think they sell hardware.
Software is hard to recoup cost on, particularly in the small markets, where I think
hardware always wins the day.

I would argue that at this point in the Pleo there is a advantage to open sourcing more of it,
and they should also find the right way to control it.

I'd look at the model of the iPhone, a device with a basic OS and function with which users
can modify, and a system to control apps on it.

Now I would think that Pleo might be handled similarly.

If I were them I'd just loosen up the SDK agreement language a little,
stay tight on the LifeOS (to start) and encourage alternative personalities and high level features.
Then create an online app mechanism where you could buy qualified
alternative personalities (created by fans) for prices fans specify, if any, with possible uplift for cost recoup
and they'd send to customers from a loaded SD card (for added cost) or just download if you are more techie
They might break even on cost.
That also would be how to deploy new upgrades to LifeOS, and any other 'gimmie' personalities.

The problem with opening too far is if somebody sends out code that physically breaks it and then
they call in for support....that's what you don't want.  That's expensive to support letting it out like that
particularly for the size of company it is, and for the cost of the product.

I think it would cost some QA time to test the incoming personalities,
and somebody to load and mail SD cards for order fulfillment.
Then there's the setup of the website for submissions and for the store (which they mostly have), but it would
be a small ongoing overhead for maintenance.  They'd have to run some numbers
and do some tests to evaluate potential costs to see if might work in such a fashion.
(Does Innvo read the forums???)

Would you get cheap/free personalities for your "Pleo"?
- grumpy
- sneezy
- sleepy (for quiet time)
- dance skit pleo (with various dances)
- hannukah pleo!
and I have a bunch of other ideas and I'm sure you can come up with more.
And yes I would buy them.  I'd also love to create some.
Would I buy an unqualified personality off some other sight that might damage my pleo? Not me.
 
 
When the form factor expands a bit from just a camarasaurus
I'd think the model would continue to apply just fine as the move from
version of LifeOS
version of form factor
to another

Then they could look at loosening up addressing whether it makes sense
to open LifeOS further if and when they become more stable.

I know that's not what you originally asked for... but seems more reasonable
from a business perspective to me.

Open Source is often a big gamble for a company as small as this. 

[mischamd]

its like all other commercial software. you owner of the software has paid people who develop it and so he wanna sell it. so why should he give it to some people for free?? if he do that nobody will buy it. the only thing you can do to get a free life os is to programm it on your own or to wait if some other people programm it under the gpl license.

[mweed]

First off, I am a big fan of open source.  Other than the pre-installed OS on the computer, I don't really use any "commercial" software.  Even this forum is run on open source programs.  And I would love to see the whole of pleo's software be open source.  Programming him is what got me interested in pleo.  But to me, it's a question of what market does Innvo Labs hope to sell to.

If they plan on marketing pleo as a cute "toy/companion" to a broad general public, then there is no point in releasing the code, and it's in their best interest to limit what people can do.  You would never dream of Wow-wee releasing the OS for the robo-raptor, or Mattel releasing the code for D-rex or furby.  That's not the point of buying one.  You buy it to play with it.  Yes, there will always be the hackers, but that's not their market.

On the other hand, if you're marketing pleo to the techie/roboticist, then putting out the PDK and OS source code is a must.

Pleo seems to be firmly straddling the fence.

My guess is that the percent of pleo owners that want to write code for pleo is very small.  The vast majority of pleo owners probably have absolutely no interest in the PDK.  The iPhone (as dragongirl mentioned) is a great example.  Everybody loves it.  And people want apps for it.  But hardly anybody writes their own apps for it.  When a new personality comes out for pleo, people love to play with it.   But while there are hundred or thousands of owners like fancyfont or b_blue_eyes who love to show off the personalities, there are only a handful like IMR creating skits, and only two or three like pleopet who have created apps.   Truth be told, a closed source pleo with no PDK would kill sales, but not a significant percentage, while an open sourced OS and robust PDK would absolutely spark sales, that also would not likely be asignificant percentage increase. 

What could drive significant increases in sales would be if there were a hundreds of personalities and dozens of true apps out there for potential pleo owners.  And those come from having developers that have the development tools they need.

Now that the iPhone hardware is maturing, and there is competition coming out, how is the iPhone being marketed?  You've seen the commercials.  It's all about the apps, not the specs on the hardware.  And yet, if you look at creating apps for the iPhone, it's incredibly restrictive and a closed market with a highly protected OS.

It works for the iPhone, because developers still see the advantages because of huge market.  So, if there were 100 million pleos out there, the current situation could be fine, because licensing through Innvo Labs would still be worth it.  But with such a small market that we have now, the current restrictive environment gives no incentive for anyone to develop for pleo.

When I talked to Derek Dotson about the licensing last month, the impression he gave is that they are leaning towards something like Apple does (including marketing "Innvo Labs approved" fan developed stuff).  They would love to have hundreds of people creating personalities, extensions, apps, etc. for pleo.  They just want to make sure they get a piece of the action.

What this all boils down to is, Innvo Labs needs to make a decision on which way they want to go.  Because, the longer they sit on the fence, the worse they look.  And before too long, they're going to alienate and loose any backing and support from the technical audience and pleo will be written off as anything other than just a cute toy.

[PleoPet]

All good points.
The iPhone analogy is very apt. There will always be many more users than developers.

But there is one major difference:
> And yet, if you look at creating apps for the iPhone, it's incredibly restrictive and a closed market with a highly protected OS.
People who develop iPhone apps do not do it to help Apple sell more iPhones/iPods.
(money is the main reason developers go though the Apple hassles to create their app. Even at $.99, and after Apple takes their cut, selling thousands of crap apps can still make a lot of money. Even free apps do it for the advertising impact)
The analogy falls down when you are asking developers to volunteer their time to help them sell more Pleos.

I suggest open source because IMHO Pleo is only going to survive if volunteers develop better software. They will be doing it for free. Pleo owners aren't going to be paying for the new software.
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re: an official approval program for robot personalities
FWIW: Sony tried this approach a long time ago in Japan for AIBO developed apps. They had to sell them at outrageous prices, in part to cover the overhead costs. Some quirky personalities were created by 3rd parties, but most were crap. It never took off as a software platform. IMHO that was a mistake that helped to kill AIBO in the long run. There are other examples (ER1, UGOBE PLEO dreams of a new OS too), all failures, not one success story I can point to.

[DragonGirl]

Yes, a very sobering story on the apps attempt by SONY.

So does it require a more 'perfect storm'? 
iphone envisioned the apps store from the beginning, the SDK was out quickly and well formed from the beginning
and together had a symbiotic relationship on the launch.
The anticipated sales of the iphone, long awaited, preloaded the SDK development interest.

Not the case here.
A phone is much more ubiquitious than robotic toys.
It is a high end niche market at best.  Marketed as a high end toy market hoping to break down the ranks?
Pleo was following on the heels of robosapien and lego's NXT as a robotics toy, both of which are much
more flexible programmatically.  What it had was 'cute', and still holds that differentiator.

Should they try to follow roomba's transformation to iRobot create , robosapien, or
Lego mindstorms/NXT and target into education to get to the next level?
If so the PDK isn't polished enough.
Or keep trying to bust out in enough consumer popularity to get the price down and sell to wider audience?

It does sound like they don't have the strategy roadmap set yet for a real relaunch, just enough
knowledge on selling what was already designed.

[Crewella]

So ........ with the upheavals I can understand this dropped out of sight................ anybody know where we're at now? With The Pleo RB release it sure would be good to have community developments ................ 

[Pleo100]

I just wanted to throw in my 2 cents:
With someone like PleoPet willing to volunteer his/her talents to creat interesting personalities, tools and skits for pleo, the company producing Pleo will most definitely increase the popularity and sales of their robot. If PleoPet can do for Pleo what he did for Aibo, Pleo could be quite the incredible robotic pet. I hope the new producers of Pleo recognize the potential of Pleo and the benefit of allowing people like PleoPet and other talented developers to enhance their product. It's really a win win situation if they do.

[Crewella]

Absolutely agree - I loved the improvements made to Aibo by Aibopet, and others - it would be great to see more input for Pleo and Pleo rb.