Date   : Fri, 06 Aug 2004 00:13:11 +0200
From   : John Kortink <kortink@...>
Subject: Re: GoMMC cards

On Thu, 5 Aug 2004 22:03:37 +0100, "Andrew Chesterton"
<andrew.chesterton@...> wrote:

>I can understand why Fiaz is asking for schematics.
>You have designed a really useful addition to the BBC which you are
offering
>for sale at a not insignificant cost that you are flatly refusing to
support
>now or in the future.

You horrendously misunderstand a couple of things here, pal.

=46irst of all, the cost /is/ insignificant, considering the amount
of development time I've put into it. I've considered marketing
GoMMC 'professionally' but first of all it's a minority interest
product (the market for it is tiny), and I would have had to
charge at least three times the price I'm asking now. I don't
want that, therefore I've decided to make do with just a little
compensation for my work (not zero, no, but only /very/ little),
instead of going for a full blown profit margin.

Second, I do not 'refuse' to support the cards at all. I certainly
will support the cards. What I said is this : I'm not making any
specific promises. For the reasons, see above. Simple economics,
specifically economics of scale.

>You are also refusing to release the design into the public domain to
allow
>people to support it themselves or in Fiaz's case continue the
production
>run, which you obviously don't want to do.
>I personally am surprised that you have sold any at all, I wouldn't buy
>anything without some form of support or a copy of the design to support
 it
>myself.

So don't buy one.

>Next thing, you will be threatening to sue anybody who reverse engineers
 the
>design in order to help somebody with a broken one who needs it fixing!

I will personally fix any broken cards, for some considerable time to
come I'm sure. Against cost for parts and postage & packaging only.

>This list is all about sharing, Hardware, Software, Knowledge and
Experience
>in order to keep a very important piece of computing history alive and
>kicking. This appears to be something that you haven't quite realised
yet!

On the contrary, I'm making quite a considerable contribution here.
I'm sacrificing a whole lot of basically unpaid time to make GoMMC,
and to do it properly.


John Kortink

-- 

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