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<meta name="Author" content="Eric S. Raymond">
<meta name="Description" content="A guide for GPS vendors: chipset manufacturers, OEMs, vendors for working with gpsd">
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<meta name="Revised" content="9 April 2015">
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<title>GPSD Welcomes Vendor Cooperation</title>
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<div id="Header">GPSD Welcomes Vendor Cooperation</div>
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<p>This page is addressed to GPS vendors: chipset manufacturers, OEMs,
and makers of retail products.</p>
<h2>We Matter To Your Future</h2>
<p>Linux and other open-source operating systems drive a
rapidly-growing segment of the market for embedded location-sensitive
systems. The reasons aren't far to seek: (1) Absence of licensing
fees is a significant draw for integrators working to hold down unit
costs, and (2) open source is now widely understood to lead to
software quality improvement.</p>
<p>Uptake of retail GPS units attached to computers running Linux or *BSD
is also significant, tracking early adoption of these operating systems
by technical experts and influence leaders.</p>
<p>The users of GPSD therefore constitute a major growth area for your
hardware sales. The GPSD developers want to help you meet that need, and
establish you as a forward-looking company with a good reputation
in our world-wide community.</p>
<p>If you've even skimmed the rest of this website, you know that we
support dozens of GPS devices, coping on behalf of applications and
users with the vagaries of the NMEA standard and vendor binary
protocols. Our development team is highly expert in all aspects of
GPS and NMEA-based technologies. That expertise can be yours for
free.</p>
<p>We maintain a <a href="hardware.html">Hardware</a> page that
is the open-source community reference for GPS shoppers. A good
rating on that page means additional sales for your product. We
also maintain a <a href='hall-of-shame.html'>GPS Hall Of Shame</a>,
and that is a place you <em>don't</em> want to end up.</p>
<p>We can be of significant technical help to you by forwarding you
high-quality bug reports, performance information, and recommendations
for documentation and design improvements. In effect, you will be
able to use us as an unpaid development and product-support arm.</p>
<h2>Understanding Open Source</h2>
<p>We've observed that many in the GPS industry are unfamiliar with
open-source development, so here is a brief explanation of how it
works:</p>
<p>Open-source projects are mostly manned by volunteers attracted to a
particular technical problem; the results are published as source code
under licenses that encourage free reuse and redistribution, and make the
code freely available to all.</p>
<p>By harnessing the power of peer review, this process has been
found to lead to a significantly higher average level of code quality
than conventional proprietary development. Open-source developers also
take pride in their demonstrated ability to respond exceptionally
rapidly to bug reports; it is not at all uncommon for open-source
projects to issue fix patches the same day as a user complaint.</p>
<p>Another advantage of open source is that we can usually assemble
more talent to attack any given problem than any but the largest
corporations can afford to hire. There are over two million
open-source programmers world-wide, and they tend to be drawn from the
top 5% of their profession in ability and experience.</p>
<p>Red Hat and other distribution vendors select and integrate the
work of literally thousands of open-source projects like GPSD to
produce entire running operating systems of unprecedentedly high
quality.</p>
<p>The main disadvantage of open-source development is that, except
for the small minority that has attracted direct corporate sponsorship
from outfits like Red Hat or major users like IBM, open-source
projects have no budgets. Also, for both philosophical and practical
reasons, we do not sign NDAs and in general cannot deal with companies
that absolutely require them.</p>
<h2>Where GPSD Fits In</h2>
<p>Some application niches have several active open-source projects
competing to serve them; for others there is only one. For GPS
monitoring, the GPSD project is it. We do a good enough job for the
entire open-source community and every distribution vendor to rely on
us.</p>
<p>The current project lead, Eric S. Raymond, is an open-source
luminary; as co-founder and President Emeritus of the <a
href='https://opensource.org/'>Open Source Initiative</a>, he has
long been one of the movement's principal theoreticians and public
spokepersons. On the whole, he'd rather be writing code.</p>
<p>At time of writing in late 2006, the GPSD project has eight core
developers and an active development mailing list of sixty-four
contributing programmers. These numbers, which are typical for a
successful mid-sized open-source project, can be expected to increase
slowly over time.</p>
<p>Given the relatively small corporate size of the typical GPS
vendor, our mailing lists probably muster more programmers than your
company's entire engineering staff. And all that talent wants
to add value to your product by writing and giving away software
that increases your product's value to customers.</p>
<p>We're in close touch with our user community, and they listen to
what we say. Our developers make themselves regularly available on <a
href="irc://irc.freenode.net#gpsd">Internet Relay Chat channel</a>
dedicated to <code>gpsd</code>.</p>
<p>We're not partial in our benevolence. We write code to solve our
problems and because we love a good knotty technical challenge; we'll
cheerfully add value to <em>anybody's</em> product, if they'll
cooperate with us.</p>
<h2>How To Cooperate With Us</h2>
<p>The GPSD project, alas, has no corporate sponsors and no budget.
We rely on code contributions from technically able users close to
their individual problems, and we rely on borrowed and donated test
hardware. (We have a <a href='wishlist.html'>wish list</a>; your product
may be on it.)</p>
<p>Here are the things we will need from you:</p>
<h3>1. Documentation</h3>
<p>We will need complete protocol documentation for your product(s).
If you are a chip or GPS-board vendor, this probably corresponds to
what you ship with your OEM or Evaluation kit.</p>
<p>Note that we are a typical open-source project in that we do not
sign NDAs — even if we wanted to, nobody on the project has the
authority to bind any of the other developers to an NDA.</p>
<p>Be aware that any portions of the information you give us that are
relevant to our programming task will be expressed by publicly
available source code and user documentation that anyone can read.
The effectiveness of our development process — and all the
benefits of it for your company — depends on this.</p>
<h3>2. Evaluation units</h3>
<p>We will need no fewer than one (1) and no more than three (3)
evaluation units of each product you want supported. These units
cannot be loaners. As we develop GPSD going forward, we must
frequently regression-test the software against supported
hardware.</p>
<h3>3. A technical liaison.</h3>
<p>You should designate a technical liaison from your engineering
staff to join our development list. The list has only moderate
traffic and our demand on the liaison's time will usually be light,
but you will find it is greatly to your advantage to have someone at
the table.</p>
<p>We feel safe in predicting that many of your development staff are
already running a Linux, BSD or other UNIX-like operating system at
home anyway, because engineers do that. We strongly suspect that if
you internally broadcast a request for a Linux or UNIX enthusiast to
work with us you won't be short of choices.</p>
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