You may recall back in February, I announced that Tech Source had changed their stance on the OGP. At that time, management decided that OGP would not be profitable within the time they wanted. They decided to put the project on hold indefinitely and pursue other priorities instead. But the engineers at Tech Source still believed in this project and decided to make an effort to fund and develop a business plan to resurrect the project either within Tech Source or with outside funding. A group of engineers have been meeting after hours and contributing their personal time and money to this effort. In addition, I negotiated to cut back my hours at Tech Source so I could spend more time working on OGP on the side.
Unfortunately, before we were able to come to a conclusive result, the professional, legal, marketing, and business planning costs had piled up to the point that we felt it was wisest to cut our losses and develop a better plan. We have decided that we would rather spend our time and money on building building real products. At present, those who have chosen to pursue this project in earnest include myself and two other hardware engineers, all current Tech Source employees. In our opinion, not only is this a worthwhile project, it is also a legacy we can help create to have a positive impact for the open source community. Tech Source is now officially no longer involved in the OGP. Arrangements with Tech Source are being finalized that remove any potential IP issues. We are, therefore, pushing forward unfettered, except for the fact that it isn't our day job. The upside of this is that we have more flexibility and freedom in the design. Now, we've decided that it's time we put aside the business approach, and tie up any legal and intellectual property loose ends, so that we can finally start to do what we do best, which is engineering. We will produce a product that we can produce, the prototype. The success or failure of this project will be dependent only on how much the community wants it. We have developed a work plan that we believe makes development of the OGP hardware feasible within our time and money constraints. Although the work plan includes development of the ASIC and final retail board, the immediate work focuses on the prototype board as a product. This may result in some changes and compromises that make the prototype somewhat of a more general-purpose device. It will include all the necessary graphics and memory hardware, plus other things that we deem are vital to its success as a product in its own right, even in the absence of the OGP graphics core. We will develop the board design and minimal IP (PCI controller, etc.), build prototypes (for a few thousand dollars out of our own pockets), and put the product on sale with a minimum delivery time of four weeks, and we will build devices in minimum lot sizes to keep production costs down. Revenue from the sale of this product will then be used to attract investors and fund the next stage, production of the ASIC. The NRE alone for the ASIC is about $1 million, which means either we'll need that much in investment money, or we'll need a partner who is willing to foot the bill and share in the revenues. (That partner could be the open source community as a whole, in some form or other.) There will be two models of prototype board: (1) A 3S4000-based board ready for the OGP core, and (2) a less expensive 3S1500-based (synthesizable with the free Xilinx Webpack) board that is purely for hobby and FPGA-lab projects, not suitable for OGP. Obviously, the work schedule has slipped. Rather than an expensive FPGA-based graphics board (in June), our first product will be an FPGA-based project board (in November) that serves as the development platform for a much less expensive ASIC-based solution (second quarter of 2006), contingent on available funding. I have included a URL for the work plan (below). It is preliminary, conservative, and up for debate. I will later provide more explanation as to what parts we are doing and what parts we hope will be done by the community. We apologize for not letting the community know sooner but, since February, it has been a time of uncertainty. Things changed so much and so often that we feared that sharing it would do nothing but create fear and doubt that might jeopardize the whole project. The remaining members of our team share a united vision and a common goal. Hopefully, by November, this will result in the availabilty of hardware that the community can help develop into a workable Linux graphics solution. An Gantt chart of the work plan is hosted here: http://opengraphics.gitk.com/ogplan.jpg _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
