Boeing announces $10.55 billion deal to divest Jeppesen, ForeFlight, AerData and OzRunways to Thoma Bravo

[EricJ]

12 minutes ago, redbaron1982 said:

Lol. Yeah, right. A team of motivated developers has developed Linux, the most used operating system ever. 

There are way to many open source success stories. 

You sound very much like Steve balmer laughing at the iPhone and iPod. 

Even critical missions with government customers tend to move toward open source these days.    The transparency is a significant benefit for security analysis.

[dzeleski]

22 minutes ago, redbaron1982 said:

Lol. Yeah, right. A team of motivated developers has developed Linux, the most used operating system ever. 

There are way to many open source success stories. 

You sound very much like Steve balmer laughing at the iPhone and iPod. 

There are way more open source failures then successes by a gigantic margin. The mathematics alone in foreflight is staggering let alone making it render correctly/smoothly.

I no longer work on any OSS anymore because I work on stuff that actually makes money. Can you find a group of people passionate about EFBs to spin up a project? Absolutely. Getting it to compete with a fully mature product with significant market share and literal billions is way harder then you think it is.

Linux was "invented" in 1991, thats 34 years of work to get it to this point. Its way harder then anyone realizes, and it takes a very special person to care THAT much about something to make it work.

Edit: Linux did not have a "team" until very very recently. The "team" was Linus Torvalds for a very very long time. Hes a "100x engineer" and those are exceptionally rare individuals.

Edited April 22 by dzeleski

[Vance Harral]

26 minutes ago, redbaron1982 said:

There are way to many open source success stories. 

Then why isn't an open source EFB already the market leader?  It's not like open source is some radical new idea as it was decades ago, nor is the concept of an EFB new, nor is there any particular technical barrier to AvareX and other EFB projects - they've got the same access to IDEs and app stores as Foreflight and Garmin.  Any thoughts on why WingX has faded into obscurity, despite having the supposed advantage of lacking huge, corporate bloat?

I'd be happy to use a well-supported open source EFB, but the fact there have been a number of really successful open source products doesn't mean open source is an automatic panacea.  Open source projects are successful when they have a strong leader and a well-designed test and support system, staffed by people interested in test, support, and documentation.  The main reason Linux was so successful is that Linus himself provided significant guidance (much of the effort ultimately wound up involving infrastructure, not coding the kernel).  Most of the people working on open source aren't actually interested in that un-sexy stuff, so most open source projects fail to sustain themselves.  That doesn't make open source bad or inferior, it just makes it "not magic".  And these problems are actually getting worse, because at this point the majority of open source projects are staffed by very junior developers - college students or "boot camp" kiddies - who are simply trying to build a resume and a body of work on GitHub to get hired for paid work.  There's nothing wrong with that, and it can result in great work, but it requires guidance from people with software management experience.  Again, you don't get a good product simply by having "motivated programmers", that's only part of the required skill set.  There's a lot of other important stuff that's not sexy, and you usually have to compensate people to get them to do it.  Saying "open source EFBs will win because Linux won" again suggests you don't really understand the reality of software development in 2025.

26 minutes ago, redbaron1982 said:

You sound very much like Steve balmer laughing at the iPhone and iPod. 

I don't understand this "zinger" at all.  The iPhone and iPod were huge projects undertaking by a commercial organization with a profit motive, staffed by hundreds of personnel performing project management, verification staff, support teams, and so forth.  A significant amount of the work that made those products successful was the development of the Xcode IDE, the infrastructure associated with the app store, collaboration with cellphone providers, marketing, and so forth.  The idea that those products were successful because of a few really good software engineers is laughable.

[N201MKTurbo]

3 minutes ago, dzeleski said:

There are way more open source failures then successes by a gigantic margin. The mathematics alone in foreflight is staggering let alone making it render correctly/smoothly.

I no longer work on any OSS anymore because I work on stuff that actually makes money. Can you find a group of people passionate about EFBs to spin up a project? Absolutely. Getting it to compete with a fully mature product with significant market share and literal billions is way harder then you think it is.

Linux was "invented" in 1991, thats 34 years of work to get it to this point. Its way harder then anyone realizes, and it takes a very special person to care THAT much about something to make it work.

And Linux is an open source copy of UNIX. So they had a prototype to work from.

[shawnd]

Just now, N201MKTurbo said:

And Linux is an open source copy of UNIX. So they had a prototype to work from.

Well it's based off of unix principles, not a copy per se. BSD is more of a "copy" or as they call it derivative work of AT&T Unix.

[EricJ]

31 minutes ago, dzeleski said:

There are way more open source failures then successes by a gigantic margin. The mathematics alone in foreflight is staggering let alone making it render correctly/smoothly.

The math isn't that hard.    I've been working on a tracker to locate ELTs with a low-cost portable system.   I've been using wx bots (ASOS, AWOS, etc.) as proxies for testing, and made a CDI display (on the tablet) to facilitate tracking to the estimated emitter location lat/lon, which gets continuously improved using various radio signal processing techniques.   I had to make my own lat/lon math processing library because I couldn't find one suitable for what I was doing.   It's not trivial, but the math isn't all that hard.   I did the whole library by myself in not much time.  Graphics processing is old hat these days since so many applications need it with a lot of libraries available for that as well.   I think the main challenge with EFBs is integrating the various rendering, processing, database, UI functions into something that doesn't continually step on itself and make a non-functional mess.   It appears that just having good, modern tools helps this a lot, which seems to be a critical element to the success of the new AvareX, which simultaneously integrates and develops everything from one source for multiple platforms.   

[GeeBee]

PEGs produce no product except for money. Thus it is axiomatic prices will increase with no value added.

[Justin Schmidt]

1 hour ago, redbaron1982 said:

The beauty of software development is that 99% of the cost is to pay a salary for a team of devs. So if you get a team of 10 (or if you go open source, maybe hundred) of motivated softwade developer pilots, I'm sure you can build the best EFB for, almost, free... just people donating their time for the cause.

Very wrong, that isn't how software engineering works or companies.

[Justin Schmidt]

13 minutes ago, N201MKTurbo said:

And Linux is an open source copy of UNIX. So they had a prototype to work from.

Linux is of no relation to Unix. Linus would slap you over the head for saying that.

[N201MKTurbo]

2 minutes ago, Justin Schmidt said:

Linux is of no relation to Unix. Linus would slap you over the head for saying that.

Bring it on…

[EricJ]

10 minutes ago, Vance Harral said:

Then why isn't an open source EFB already the market leader?  It's not like open source is some radical new idea as it was decades ago, nor is the concept of an EFB new, nor is there any particular technical barrier to AvareX and other EFB projects - they've got the same access to IDEs and app stores as Foreflight and Garmin.  Any thoughts on why WingX has faded into obscurity, despite having the supposed advantage of lacking huge, corporate bloat?

There used to be a lot of institutional biases against "free" or "open source" projects because of perceived quality issues.   In many areas that's been swinging the other way, or at least there's no longer a quality assumption either way.   The increasing trend to minimize testing or minimize development time or cost (via things like agile) has led to a signficant decline in commercial software quality in many markets for a long time.   So now there are many customers that may prefer open source for quite a few reasons. 

Another aspect is that most open-source projects don't do a lot of marketing or have sales people, so they're expected to be underdogs in the market.   The big corporations aren't always their target market, so, yeah, they often don't wind up there.   Sometimes they do, though, and that seems to be happening more these days than it used to.   I've been genuinely surprised to see some of the places where a complex, highly-integrated app with security needs, etc., etc., turns out to be open-source (e.g., TAK/ATAK).

[GeeBee]

You are not going to see open source on anything other than Part 91 operators due to the FAA security requirements. This is why most air carriers use iOS because it and its management system is certified out of the box. One US carrier spent millions to get Windows tablets certified only to toss the whole thing in the can after two years as being almost unmanageable. You see no air carriers using Android because it can never meet the FAA requirements for robustness and most important, security. It is almost impossible to design open source to meet FAA and ICAO security for 121 and 135 and let’s be realistic, those operators are where the money is at.

[redbaron1982]

Even if people don't like it, it is clear that open-source has won over closed-source projects. And it is not only about how many successful open-source projects there are, it is also about enterprises releasing many projects as open-source, contributing to open-source projects, and adopting project management methods that were born in open-source communities.

Even the most rancid institutions, like PMI, have made Agile a core part of their PMP curricula. The few software companies still doing software the old way, are either bankrupt, or on their way to bankruptcy in the next 10 years. This is not to say the closed-source is dead, for sure it is not, but the % of closed source vs open source projects that are powering mission critical systems, is tilted way more to the open source side.

Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure, hugely successful commercial products, rely mostly on open-source software. Azure RDS and Databricks, the main competitors in the data warehouse arena, relies mostly on open source software. Wordpress, which powers over 50% of Internet sites, is open-source.

To the question of why there is not a successful EFB, there could be a multitude of reasons, starting with not having a community interested in investing the time to do it, and adding on top what @GeeBee mentions of regulatory requirements, which can add significantly to the development cost.

[A64Pilot]

1 hour ago, GeeBee said:

PEGs produce no product except for money. Thus it is axiomatic prices will increase with no value added.

Yes, it’s what we have turned into, from a Nation of producers, into one that makes money by playing with it.

[N201MKTurbo]

I would be in favor of outlawing Private Equity Groups, except they are funding my current enterprise. And I’m a private equity investor.

[1980Mooney]

1 hour ago, redbaron1982 said:

To the question of why there is not a successful EFB, there could be a multitude of reasons, starting with not having a community interested in investing the time to do it, and adding on top what @GeeBee mentions of regulatory requirements, which can add significantly to the development cost.

You missed the biggest reason.  The population of potential users is too small.  We always overestimate our importance in the marketplace.

Of course they could add distracting pop-up ads to defray the cost.  Like MooneySpace.  Even ADSBExchange has annoying ads now.

 

[N201MKTurbo]

If an ad pops up when I’m in the clag on an instrument approach, I’ll be pissed.

[McMooney]

3 hours ago, redbaron1982 said:

+1

Getting something basic I'd say that is a ~1MUSD investment, getting to the level that foreflight is, i think it can go as high as 100MUSD, or more

the value is really in the data and integrations they have,  i could probably build you something really really close to foreflight for a few million.  100M  budget would probably get you something seriously next level.  

100Mill i think i'd  be able to finish my Assisted reality Istrument panel

[Will.iam]

Fltplango is another free efb. Yes much more clunky than foreflight and garminpilot but the only other software i know that will communicate with a gtx345 via bluetooth and display tcas traffic and get wx from ads-b. 
 

[Jeff Uphoff]

2 hours ago, dzeleski said:

Edit: Linux did not have a "team" until very very recently. The "team" was Linus Torvalds for a very very long time. Hes a "100x engineer" and those are exceptionally rare individuals.

That's not even remotely true. I started doing Linux development in early 1993--Linux was barely a year old at that point--and it and projects it leveraged, such as GNU and Athena/X, were already thriving and distributed worldwide over Usenet and various email lists. Heck, I felt like a latecomer to the party at the time!

I coauthored some of Linux's initial networking documentation in 1993 and then cofounded the original security project in 1994, by which time multiple companies had already sprung up in the ecosystem, most notably Red Hat.

By the late 90s/early 00s, there was a flurry of Linux-related IPOs (I was granted share allocations in them), and I was working with Linus at Transmeta and was even briefly his team lead in our Linux group. He, I, and a couple of others cofounded the Linux Kernel Organization around then, and I served on its board until 2012, when we merged it into the Linux Foundation--where Linus had already been a fellow for close to a decade.

There's nothing "very very recently" about any of this.

Fun aside: Linus and I knocked around Northern California a bit in my first Mooney, a vintage M20C, when we worked together there.

--Up.

[MikeOH]

2 hours ago, GeeBee said:

PEGs produce no product except for money.

Hmm, seems like the product of ANY business better be money...not much of a business, if not.

[1980Mooney]

4 hours ago, PeteMc said:

No need to speculate too much.  Equity firms usually buy things to sell them.  So give it a couple of months and there will probably be a new owner again for the various pieces.  Maybe as one package, maybe split up. 

Huh....Arcline acquired Parker Hannifin Aircraft Wheel & Brake Division in 2022, Hartzell in 2023, Cleveland Aircraft Wheel and Brake in 2024.  So far all they have done is raise prices.......

You are right that we don't need to speculate about the outcome.

[GeeBee]

The data is not all thst valuable. The charting data comes from the ICAO recognized government authority. Jeppesen for instance just takes government data and formats it appropriately to yheir users. Reality is there is a lot of data base providers in the marketplace for commercial aircraft that format data for use in FMS systems. Jeppesen is just one. That business is very competitive.

[GeeBee]

5 minutes ago, MikeOH said:

Hmm, seems like the product of ANY business better be money...not much of a business, if not.

Don’t confuse product with profit. One is of value the other is value.

[DXB]

40 minutes ago, N201MKTurbo said:

If an ad pops up when I’m in the clag on an instrument approach, I’ll be pissed.

Beat me to it - I immediately envisioned  trying to skip a targeted ad for men’s hair growth products obscuring my georeferenced approach plate as enter low IMC.