Open Source Business

Universal Electronics Inc. (UEI), best known for its line of universal remote controls, also sells SimpleCenter, an all-in-one application for Windows PCs that ties together in a single interface all of a user’s multimedia devices and software. It streamlines the management of photos, music, and movies, and even acts as a Universal Plug and Play server so you can stream your files to any device on your home network, while the software converts files to the proper format for the device. Recently, UEI released the basic version of SimpleCenter under the terms of the GNU General Public License in order to take advantage of the community’s ability to make the software better faster than the company can do it alone.

SimpleCenter gets shipped with some digital audio receiver products, such as the Motorola simplefi, and it is also downloadable from SimpleCenter.com. SimpleCenter was originally produced by SimpleDevices, which UEI acquired in 2004 as part of its product line expansion. UEI offers a premium version of SimpleCenter for $30 with a proprietary license; it features video transcoding, some remote access and photosharing, and other sync options that run from proprietary codecs, Hersch says; it can’t be released under the GPL.

“Our focus with SimpleCenter is to give consumers the ability to access all their media and devices,” says Michael Hirsch, director of product development for UEI. “Most of the time they have to use different applications for every device. It’s cumbersome and confusing.”

With UEI’s ongoing efforts to expand and enrich SimpleCenter’s feature set, it began to explore new avenues of research. “One of the things we’ve been struggling with is being able to have access to all the devices we want to support and the ongoing testing that is necessary,” says Randy Fish, the lead engineer for SimpleCenter. “We’ve always been a small team, and it’s not possible for us to test every MP3 player and cell phone out there.” Fish discovered the possibilities of interacting with an open source development community watching what happened with another SimpleDevices product, Omnifi, after it was no longer manufactured or supported. “Some users developed a community around it and they were adding features that we never really thought of.”

UEI thought open-sourcing SimpleCenter might be a way to leverage the interest and participation of developers in the community. “We’re up against some big players with big budgets,” Hersch says. “The idea was, how do we compete against that in a way that gets us a product that’s more in line with what users actually want.” In August of 2006, UEI released SimpleCenter as GPL software and set up a project page at SimpleCenter.org.

Fish had no experience with open source software before SimpleCenter was GPLed; in fact, no one at Universal Electronics had ever worked with anything except proprietary software. “This is a new realm for us,” Fish says. “We’re learning as we go how best to work in the open source environment.”

There has been no shortage of interested developers, Fish says, but the challenge has been to persuade those who make changes or add features to give those changes back. For instance, he says, one developer has written code to enable SimpleCenter to run on Linux, but he just hasn’t gotten around to submitting the patches. “They’re on their own timeline,” Fish says. “Obviously, we can’t force them to check anything back in. But we’re trying to figure out ways to incent them to contribute the code back.” UEI is considering offering small rewards like free universal remotes to entice coders to share their enhancements.

One of the biggest challenges UEI is facing is “having the community know that we’re out there,” Fish says. “Getting them to want to contribute. We’re still working toward that, and just getting the word out there that we are open source is one of the first steps. One thing we did think of that might be hard to facilitate is to have some sort of contest for contributions.” Fish says UEI hasn’t hired any open source developers yet, but the company would consider it. “A contest winner would be a solid candidate” for any possible job openings, he says.

Fish says that UEI will probably save some money on research and development as a result of opening the code, but that wasn’t the initial motivation for GPLing SimpleCenter. “We really just want to throw as wide a net over people as possible. There’s a strong analogy to our core remote control business: we capture infrared codes, but we really rely on end users to provide some of that data back to us.” Hersch adds that having a community surrounding SimpleCenter “allows us time to focus on core features that will enable a better experience. If the community feels a certain feature is important, then someone will add it, or motivate us to add it.”