Date : Thu, 05 Aug 2004 23:39:18 +0100
From : "Andrew Chesterton" <andrew.chesterton@...>
Subject: Re: GoMMC cards
I know it's a top post and I apologise for that.
Thanks John,
You have answered all the questions that I and possibly a number of other
people on the list have had about your GoMMC project.
Some of your statements up to now have appeared rather negative, so I took
that to mean what I said.
I understand development time and costs. I've done it myself on small
projects with limited markets, and like you have put in the time to do it
properly with little or no reward for the effort put in.
Sorry for my misunderstandings about your project.
Andrew.
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.
First 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
--
Email : kortink@...
Homepage : http://www.inter.nl.net/users/J.Kortink