Lightform's Sunset

Re:Lightform's Sunset by josh2600 on Monday February 07, 2022 @02:49PM (#30250011)

Lightform is sick. I wish they'd open source everything instead of (I assume) selling all IP to a patent troll to recoup sunk costs.

If I were a VC, I would make it a covenant in any seed investment that the company had to open-source everything if they didn't make it to profitability.

I honestly feel, in this day and age, patents don't really help you until you get to the scale that they do (purely defensive) unless you're a troll.

Don't feed the trolls.

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Re:Lightform's Sunset by astroalex on Monday February 07, 2022 @03:00PM (#30250177)

I completely agree.

I think in the case of Lightform, their core projection mapping algorithm is already public and has open source implementations. It's called "structured light". A quick search turned up this open source implementation: https://github.com/jhdewitt/sltk

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Re:Lightform's Sunset by bsedlm on Monday February 07, 2022 @03:05PM (#30250239)

maybe that's why they failed, they should have kept it closed and private with tight controls, patents, etc... in order to really profit.

couldn't they even get in trouble with their investors for having failed to achieve profitability with this misguided "open" strategy?

/devil's-advocate

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Re:Lightform's Sunset by astroalex on Thursday February 10, 2022 @01:14AM (#30282966)

I could be wrong but I think they built their product on research that was already open and public. I believe the technique predates the company.

Their "moat" was never the mapping algorithm itself; it was the suite of tools (hardware and software) that allowed users to easily map content without understanding the details of that algorithm.

I don't think their problem was that everyone was flocking to the open source tools. I think their problem is that the market for automatic projection mapping is extremely small.

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