Not intending to put a value judgement on the "pay for a better SlimServer"
issue, but:
From: "Mark Lanctot" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I have even less money than coding skills right
now, but this doesn't feel right to me.
...
Maybe I shouldn't expect things to be free
forever, but for some of us a Squeezebox is a
large investment and pumping more money into it on
an ongoing basis is not very appealing. I don't
mind paying for players when/if I require them as
they are worth it though.
The other way of looking at this:
Name any other product (or any product at all, really) that offers unlimited
software upgrades (and new features from time to time, etc) for the life of
the product, where the life of the product is essentially "unlimited". I'm
failing to come up with anything.
I use a ton of software from a variety of vendors: Microsoft, Intuit, Cisco,
HP, Van Dyke, Palm, VMware, and others (anti-virus, etc). None of these
vendors offer unlimited upgrades (with new features) forever. The closest
is Palm, but they never offer "new features"; just the ability to continue
to run their desktop software on future versions of the O/S (if you want new
Palm features, you buy new hardware). A number of vendors (primarily
Microsoft and Cisco, I guess) will offer new versions (and new features) if
you pay for maintenance. But we SlimServer users don't do that either.
Now, I'm a heavy user of Fedora as well, and that's free. But that's
totally open source, and not funded at all by hardware sales. So it's not
really the same.
I like the SlimServer software being free. I've also contributed to the
SlimServer software (I worked with Fred on the SlimServerMod extension to
allow the AMX NetLinx automation system drive a SlimServer). This would
have been "trickier" if it weren't totally open source software.
That said: if Slim Devices were to do what most other companies do, they'd
charge for new major versions of their software. Doing this would change
the cost structure a lot, and likely fund a number of engineers hired by
Slim Devices. It might also kill the non-Slim contributors to the
SlimServer (unsure).
-- Jeff
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