Larry wrote:

Poit wrote in
00.119:

Open standards has worked well for the
internet for years and this could be applied here as well.

AS much as I like open source and open standards, on boat electronics I'll
have to disagree. Profits would be so low with so few actual customers,
none of them would survive.....

How many people within 10 square miles of your house own a boat radar?

See my point? The market is really TINY, even if the clients are very
rich. Bill Gates is only gonna buy ONE radar for his yacht. The guy down
your dock only buys his because he can't get one for free on the cheap.

So, we sold 2 radars at amazing profit margins.....instead of one at lots
less profit margin in the open source radar world.

Manufacturers would flee the market if they couldn't rip off the rich
boaters with proprietary stuff to sell 'em more.......

The market is just not there.....

hmmmm, well, firstly I measure square kilometers, secondly where I live on
the Norwegian coast I would count about 3000 leasure boat owners in the ten
square kilometers, about half of them has a closed top boat with
permanently fitted equipment like autopilot, GPS, some chart plotters etc.
I would guess some 10% having large leasure boats with radar. Then there
are somewhere between 20-50 full time or part time fishermen, all with
fully equipped electonics on board and finally, we only have two ship lines
with a total fleet of about 30 large commercial vessels using expensive
stuff from Kongsberg, JRC and others.

We who pay for our own stuff rant on a regular basis about the lacking
interoperability, cost and for the techies - moaning&groaning about the
closed proprietary standards removing all the fun.

I agree with the original posting: communication should be as open as HTML
and our kroner, dollars or what have you should be spent on developing
better systems, not closed systems.

I'd buy that open box, and a few houndred others in my neghbourhood.