Joined: 3-Feb-2004 Posts: 584
From: Lincoln, England
@blitterstorm
I will look into the possibility of open sourcing the design, it depends on the licensing restrictions palced on the design by momentum. Yes, I want to involve as many communities as possible but I am not sure how to go about this and I am but one man, if you know forums where you can publicse this then by all means go forth and do so, we will have to come up with ways of publicising the website once it laucnhes. Also Apple killed their clones business a long time ago and I don't think jobs is about to change his mind, although I sup[ose there is no harm in asking closer to the time. I don't think their is a simulator available, I certainly haven't heard of one if there is and momentum and IBM don't publicise details of it, you would probably ahve to buy a board to get it anyway, that seems to be the only way to get anything out of momentum. IBM have tried a few times to create an open PowerPC specification first with CHRP (COmmon hardware Reference Platform) then with POP (PowerPC Open Platform) but both times a lack of support from the largest PowerPC desktop manufacturer (Apple) has sunk the project before it canget off the ground. Check out www.openppc.org
Damn I see some dangers making the design open source
Somme rich and BAD computer firm could just take the design, and make a bigg a** production and sell it before Eyetech could put it into production, get the board produced at a much lower prices than Eyetech could manege, and sell it for a lower prices.
Eytech would not a hard time to sell it to the general ppc market, and have problems to get the manufacturing off scale bonus, as lots of potential customers have already bougth the same product for a cheaper price.
The BAD computer firm would then be the big winner, got free R&D, and we would lose.
In this ligth I see it would be better if R&D is done inhouse in Eyetech, with the aid of digitaldisaster and eventualy other amiga engineers and technicans.
Some stuff, may be done in the open withouth to much risk