On 5/17/05, Eric Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Timothy wrote about availability of RTL before it is GPL'd: > > With an NDA, this should be fine. Of course, there's a risk of it > > getting leaked if too many people get it, so even with the NDA, it > > shouldn't be free; this way, only serious people get it, and I believe > > there are some legal reasons why a contract is more binding when money > > is exchanged (something about 'consideration'), but IANAL. > > > > In any event, what should it cost? And it would be easier to roll the > > 'hobbyist' and 'commercial' license into one, where the up-front fee > > isn't too bad in either case, and there's also a royalty for each chip > > you produce. > > I'd be willing to sign an NDA that didn't have any particularly > onerous terms, and I'd pay a $50 license fee without having to think > hard about it. I'd probably be willing to pay more, but as the fee > goes up it becomes a bit harder for me to justify (since I expect to > pay a fairly substantial sum for the 3S4000-based hardware). > > On the other hand, for a commercial license, $50 up front is way too low. > $25K (plus royalties) would be a more plausible baseline, and even that > may be on the low side. > > Of course, you can offer the license at a published price to anyone, > and if you know of specific people that you are certain will contribute > significant value to the project, you can always privately negotiate > a lower (perhaps much lower) price for those people. > > Until the time comes that you have developed an effective monopoly on > the graphics card market, there's no reason why you can't use > discriminatory pricing for licenses. Once you've reached monopoly > status, the FTC looks askance at such practices. :-)
Some means needs to exist for owners of the prototype board to get a reasonable price on a hobby-use license for the RTL. I want to weed out the not-serious people, and to have an NDA means that there's contract paperwork, so it's going to be expensive just to have the license written up in the first place. You see why I am of two minds on this. As a user of this board, I'd think that paying the $500+ for the board would perhaps let me have a rebate on the RTL license. And as a user, I also wouldn't be willing to share it on P2P networks, so $50 wouldn't seem "so cheap" that I'd think it was worthless. As the developer, however, while I'm not worried about a hobbyst getting a leaked copy, I AM worried about "evil big corporation" getting their hands on it. If Daniel can get those investors he talks about to offer us gobs of money to offset the GPL risk, all of this will be moot. :) In the mean time, I'll have to discuss it with my partners, because I know they're not going to be nearly so willing as I am to license the RTL cheaply, in part because the investors won't look positively on it either. To the traditional investor, everything has value, therefore, everything should have a price, preferably a high one. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
