On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 9:31 AM, mickeyf <[email protected]> wrote: > > The discussion of this has probably been the longest thread on this board. > My understanding is that it boils down to two things: > > 1) The BB was designed and intended as a development board and for > hobbyists, not as a commercial product. It's reliability level is more than > adequate, but BeagleBoard.org can't stand behind, guarantee, or endorse it > for a use that was not intended.
Along this line, it comes down to us: * not knowing the end commercial product use ---- so we have to make sure you take responsibility for that and don't blame us when you use it different than we anticipated and haven't documented every aspect of what might matter to you * not knowing we'll won't update the design to have a newer component or extra feature that might not work in your exact application * can't handle getting a boat load of returns because of one of the above because we've priced it as a development board without all the margin required to handle these potential issues > > 2) If you, as an oem, order thousands of boards rather than manufacturing > your own from the freely published design, you are restricting the > availability of boards to hobbyists and other developers. The hope was to > provide small numbers of boards to many people and organizations rather than > many boards to a small number of people and organizations. High volume > commercial use works against this. This has become the more practical issue. It wasn't that we didn't know the demand was going to be high, but our manufacturing partners intended to have 16 week lead times and information from people placing volume orders. When distributors had a bit of a stock position last year, they hit the breaks a bit and that started a very ugly domino effect. They asked to slow down shipments and left CircuitCo scrambling to downsize their production without losing their shirt. At the same time, the stock position triggered more people to try out the boards and stock them in places like Radio Shack and Microcenter and everyone started coming out of the woodwork looking for boards. Back in April, when I wrote http://beagleboard.org/blog/2014-04-13-dude-wheres-my-beaglebone-black/, I anticipated us being back in that in-stock position before the end of summer. Well, it turns out it took a while for Element14 to start to really get an idea of the size of the demand and they are still scrambling to catch up with their own backlog. We can't stop (and don't necessarily want to stop) people putting these boards into products, but they need to: 1) take responsibility to determine its suitability themselves 2) take ownership of the supply chain by establishing sane lead-time orders with our existing manufacturing partners or others and not disrupting the existing supply I believe this would have all been a lot better if we'd taken all the risk (of building too many) in one place, but we've instead spread it out across many distributors and multiple manufacturing partners (CircuitCo being the official one, Element14 being an alternative and now I've seen that folks like Special Computing are shipping "no logo" boards). Still, the comments on the thread speak for themselves regarding the quality and clearly the demand is there. > > Having said that, there are commercial users who require too few boards to > economically manufacture themselves (dozens or hundreds), and who do > purchase in those quantities and use them in commercial products. Should > they? I suspect if supply were unlimited no one would care much one way or > the other, but at times it has been tight. How many is too many? Your call. > > > > On Wednesday, September 17, 2014 2:32:24 AM UTC-7, sufi al hussaini wrote: >> >> Hi everyone, >> >> Just wanted to ask about this. I have read this at more than one place, >> but I couldn't understand the reason behind it. >> Why shouldn't I use BBB in commercial products? Or why isn't it >> encouraged? >> >> Does it have something to do with over all system stability and other >> technical issues? Or is it simply because BBB production is lagging behind >> demand? >> >> Regards, >> Zaxter. > > -- > For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "BeagleBoard" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
