Originally posted by jatrax How closed is k-mount at this time? Has any patents expired?
And Sigma, Tamron, Samyang and others already make lenses for k-mount so it is not 'closed' as in no one can use it. I don't know if they license it from Pentax or not but either they do or it is no longer under patent protection.
I don't think making the mount 'open' as in 'open source' will make any difference. Anyone who wants to make lenses for k-mount already does.
But, one area that the OP's idea might apply to would be an API to the camera itself so that app developers could create tethering or anything else that their creative minds come up with.
I believe k-mount is a non-defendable mechanism meaning the patent has expired.
Tamron and Sigma reverse engineer.
Canon makes it very hard to reverse engineer. I suspect they will make it harder to preserve optical sales which is the major revenue stream for their sand foundry.
An optical company will keep their API for optical information proprietary in the future I predict because they don't want their sand in front of the commodity camera body. Or they will do limited licensing, such as Fuji with Zeiss (which is really just a form of outsourcing). AF and lens correction in-camera can be chipped tot he lens itself in such a way as to prevent reverse engineering. I believe this is already done in Mamiya/Phase One medium format and with Hasselblad (not sure but I would not be surprised).
An open API for networking to mobile and desktop OS's would be ideal, but an optical company's crown jewels are the working knowledge of its optics.
I was working with Apple on the Pansonic LX5 for Aperture as a beta tester and Panasonic would not release their distortion correction code for that camera. A tiff with Apple or whatever, it was no something that could be reverse engineered without ripping the optics apart and rebuilding the camera using different software. Apple would not do that (cost) so the LX5 had no RAW import for ages until Panasonic relented.
I predict if sales contract in the ILC sector the big guns (Canon and Nikon) will make it much harder to reverse engineer and we will see in the future lenses and mount data based on optical performance made more proprietary, not less. This is how glass grinders keep their product from becoming a commodity in front of someone else's chips.