There is no hostility... Simple facts..
You are THE example of how it is waste of time.... After all the effort, you achieved nothing that would even resemble the scope.
That is not to tell that you don't have impressive technical skills, or that it is in any way some kind of failure on your side.
Quite the opposite, you have my respect for demonstrated skills.
It is just a testament, that despite your high skill level, you would need 3,4,5 more years to achieve something that would be similar to what you started with, the DS1054Z... Because it is so hard...
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That is just waste of time.... Because it's not realistic, as evidenced by many examples so far...
I don't necessarily disagree with you. However, I've seen projects start like that (for example d-Box 2 linux), and they turned out to be really good. For d-box 2, a group of enthusiasts started to take apart a satellite receiver that was "cheaply available" (for some definition of cheap), removed all software other than the bootloader, and proceeded to build all software from scratch. It took over a year or so until you could watch TV on the thing again. It took multiple years to have a UI that was worth the name "_User_ Interface". Said UI (or derivatives of it) has been the "industry standard" (in a certain - but really relevant subset - of the market, i.e. that part of the market where you could have a decent profit margin). Dozens of companies eventually built commercial hardware (some of them clones, but most of them own developments with significant improvements) that was powered by this ecosystem. It didn't come without drama of course, and due to satellite TV losing versus online streaming, it's not highly relevant anymore, but I consider it a 15y+ success story.
Some projects take their time and need the right alignment of stars to happen and to properly scale. We're taking open-source projects for granted that were seen as "impossible", "too complex", "not viable" for years. Just take a look at what happens with open-source FPGA toolchains right now. And at the same time we're seeing many projects failing for exactly the reasons you've mentioned. But even "Linux Desktop" isn't the counter-example anymore that it used to be...
Thank you for response. I must distress that I don't "root" against it. Quite the opposite, I'm saddened that Open Source anything is not more successful.. Those ideas were conceived by my generation, many moons ago, and I still remember the promise it held...
Some things happened, but frankly, compared to expectations back then, not much. We really thought it will change the world. It didn't, but it did make a world a slightly better place... Still a good thing...
Now a not why I think this way specifically about scopes. Scopes are highly custom, proprietary and highly non standardized platforms.
If some manufacturer would really make a scope and make it Open platform, without royalties, and fully documented, that would stand a chance of maybe be a successful Open Source scope.
It was much easier making operating system for highly standardized and very inexpensive PC platform, because, as the time passed by, brand new PC still had to be backwards compatible and had to run 7 years old code perfectly.
That was very important factor that gave Linux community 25 years of continuity to develop evolutionary, as code and as a community. Same goes for other PC targeted software, to some extent.
Scopes are more like big bang event, there is hectic hardware /software effort at one very concentrated and short time period, and then some period of debug, then team dilution and just long term support for minor bugs.
All new development happens on next model cycle...
Fact that many of these scopes run ARM/linux is not important. That doesn't make it standardized platform. On a scope platform is the data acquisition engine and connected parts, and different manufacturers make it a point to be as different as possible. So every effort will probably be isolated for specific manufacturers model and will have very limited reuse for something else.
All of that makes it very much harder than PC based software.