On 11 May 2005 23:08:47 +0100, Peter TB Brett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> First off, let me say that I understand the predicament you're in -- > I'd like to assure everyone that it's much, _much_ harder to detect > copying of an RTL source than of software code. > > OTOH, if I was in your position I wouldn't actually be particularly > bothered by a competitor making an FPGA card and marketing it as > "Optimised for OGP" or whatever. Basically, my rational is thus: > > 1. They hope to sell cards thanks to OGP > > 2. If they kill off OGP, the sort of people who would have bought > cards, won't > > 3. So even if they put OGP out of business selling _hardware_ they'd > probably be amenable to making substantial contributions to the > project or just buying the OGP team out and giving them jobs -- in > which case having GPL'd the RTL would be a _good_ thing from the > POV of the community Do you think people who decide to do this will be the sorts that think far enough ahead to consider the consequences? Here's a great opportunity to possibly make a notable amount of money in a short period of time, with a huge chunk of their work already done for them at zero cost. To some people, that's good enough... suck what you can out of it until it dies then move on. Reasonable people would realize that a better business approach would be to license our code so they have the love and support of the community and the developers. We're not really all that worried about reasonable people here. We're also not trying to deal with highly likely situations either. Investors are afraid of bad things that COULD happen, even unlikely ones. They want to make sure that bad things are PREVENTED. It's also confusing to some investors who don't care to totally understand things. The question is, "Why would someone pay you for it if they can get it for free?" Mind you, there are answers to this for both open source software and hardware. But the very fact that someone can "get it for free" blows the minds of some business people. They want to make sure that only we can make money from it. This is, of course, vendor lock-in. But we only need lock-in for a long enough period of time for an investor to get their money back with some gains. And some of those things are negotiable. It's bad enough that there is no market research to prove our case. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
