There is a project by John Schimmel at NYU's ITP program who made this originally... then this company is profiting from his open source documentation on the lights without giving him credit, or any percentage. O'Reilly's MAKE magazine featured the documentation sometime in spring. SO MAKE YOUR OWN FOR 10$ and maybe write John a letter of condolence.

We're almost all ITP people here, and so we're big supporters. It would be helpful, since you feel so strongly, to make the contacts and let John know what's going on. If I can help in any way, I will, but you left no contact information.

Hi, I'm John from ITP. someone sent me this link to see the fireflies jar. I enjoyed making a similar project to this but I don't really care if someone else has something like it. That's why I put a Creative Commons sticker on it - just like PopGadget does.

While I plan to build things in the future to support myself, selling fireflies won't be the way I do it. The projects are different anyway - only the name is the same - I see a dozen different elements just from the picture.

People at ITP are great, but sometimes we get scared of losing our ideas. Must forgive us - it's the lack of clean air in nyc and the looming college debt.

I'm glad John Schimmel was kind enough to share his thoughts about our Firefly Magic(TM) Fireflies in Jar kit... pointing out to readers the fact we did not copy his work.

We've been creating electronic firefly products for several years and perform all our R&D activities in-house. Our products are enjoyed by homeowners, as well as used by universities for firefly reasearch, as we can program our patent pending 'fireflies' to replicate the exact flash pattern of any variety of firefly.

I'm sorry a few of the readers thought that we stole this idea from John, but we began our work on this technology over ten years ago.

Best regards,
Stephen Taylor - Firefly Magic -
Sigma Two Industries