Bob Camp wrote: > There is a "dark side" to this. The better you document the product, > the easier it is to duplicate. Simply buying parts and tossing them on > a pc board is pretty easy these days. Documenting without giving away > to much is a fairly difficult art.
Certainly, there is some truth in that statement. I've been in enough meeting with patent and IP attorneys myself to be intimately familiar with the tension here. BUT: Not documenting the pinout of connectors or what chips are on a board is just silly. If someone REALLY wants to know what JP3 does, and cares enough to spend a few hours and a few hundred $, they can use a voltmeter to track it down to pins on the chips (probably after unsoldering the BGA chips to get to the pads). With a few hundred $ more, they can get the board X-rayed (seen that done often enough when diagnosing defective boards). And anyone who wants to duplicate the board would have ample economic incentive to perform these reverse-engineering tasks, while they make no economic sense to the purchaser of a board. Not documenting the board does not in any fashion prevent or slow down loss of intellectual property. It simply inconveniences the customers, and scares off would-be-customers. Having said that, I'm sure that Soren knows where his priorities are, and that he is working on something that is more important that fixing documentation for older boards. -- Ralph Becker-Szendy [EMAIL PROTECTED] (408)395-1435 735 Sunset Ridge Road; Los Gatos, CA 95033 _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
