Last Updated on April 3, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
William Croft from OpenBCI said, that www.OpenBCI.com has only an income from selling OpenBCI components. But what happens if www.OpenBCI.com does not sell sell any components anymore? Will the domain www.OpenBCI.com be gone then?
And if we are looking at the information we have gathered about OpenBCI in the last view years, which is documented in our journal under the tag OpenBCI:
https://petergamma.org/tag/openbci/
If we are looking at this information we are asking the question: is www.OpenBCI.com a company who wants to be successful in the future? Or will the rats soon leave the sinking ship?
If so, we have to care about the future of OpenBCI by ourselves.OpenBCI is an open source project. But who cares about the documentation of www.OpenBCI.com? Will the documentation be lost from one day to another, if nobody cares about that? OpenBCI CEO Conor Russomanno does not care about there the OpenBCI WIFI shield, which has issues and is not available since more than two years. Would it not be easy for him to relaunch it, Russomanno, the developer of the 20 000 USD OpenBCI Galea? But Conor Russomanno seems not care about the OpenBCI WIFI shield. Does he not care also about www.OpenBCI.com? Who of the OpenBCI team cares about the OpenBCI documentation, if the domain www.OpenBCI.com disappears? If Conor Russomanno does not do it, who else will do it?
For these reasons, the OpenBCI documentation is one of the endangered cultural assets of mankind and should be protected. If not, we risk, that the documentation is lost, and can we use OpenBCI components without the OpenBCI documentation? The documentation is open source as OpenBCI is an open source project. The documentation can be modified by anybody. Therefore, anybody can also make a backup of www.OpenBCI.com to have a copy which is save. We therefore suggest anybody who is interested in OpenBCI also in the future to back up the domainwww.OpenBCI.com.
If not, there is a risk, that from one day to another, the domain www.OpenBCI.com will be gone, as the Muse SDK was gone from one day to another. And following the Muse Headband, the next option on the price scale is the Unicorn Black by g.tec medical for 1000 USD & 400,00 USD for the Python API.
If OpenBCI would disappear, whould this not be a big loss? OpenBCI might not be a big business. But does it not have many friends around the world? Yes, we think so. But we think, the OpenBCI community is not sustainable. According to our own little experience, many OpenBCI users do some projects or experiments, and then don’t use the device anymore. Eventually, if OpenBCI would disappear, many would choose the Unicorn Black instead. But the Unicorn is not an open source project.
As far as we know, Neurosity is based on OpenBCI. They have built their own product out of it. If you are interested to have also in the future an open source BCI project, backup the OpenBCI documentation, since OpenBCI could disappear from the market. Several projects, in which we were interested in, disappeared, as for instance the Muse SDK. It was interesting for us personally, but eventually not for the developer. Therefore be sure to backup the OpenBCI documentation. Who knows if it is available also tomorrow.