[Arm-netbook] $250 Dev Kit

[Gordan Bobic]

Philip Hands wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:12:42 +0000, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
>> Philip Hands wrote:
>>> On Fri, 6 Jan 2012 09:30:15 +0000, lkcl luke <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 9:18 AM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
>>>>> Alejandro Mery wrote:
>>>>>> First of all, thank you Tom! you are amazing!
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I just replied Eva telling her that I am buying one for the $250, and
>>>>>> asking how to pay it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This is the brochure I got from her before http://goo.gl/T2fQu if
>>>>>> anyone else wants to see what's in the kit.
>>>>> That looks really nice. I'd love to work on this, but for the next month
>>>>> I'm unlikely to have the time - I have to get the RedSleeve beta (RHEL6
>>>>> port) out for public testing. After that, however, I'll be looking to
>>>>> put together kernels for as many ARM systems as I can for it, so at that
>>>>> point getting one of these would be really handy - assuming Allwinner
>>>>> want a clone of RedHat Enterprise running on it (since RedHat don't have
>>>>> a port of their own for ARM).
>>>>  so, you'll be doing something that's of benefit to them (but you
>>>> don't need the schematics to do it).
>>>>
>>>>  the question you need to ask yourself is, therefore: why would you
>>>> want to _pay_ allwinner to get something done that _they_ will benefit
>>>> from, rather than the other way round? :)
>>> You have a good point there actually -- back in the day when people
>>> still used faxes, I used to maintain mgetty for Debian, and USRobotics
>>> would send me their new models to test for free.
>>>
>>> Its about time one or two of the hardware manufacturers woke up to the
>>> fact that they could get a market advantage by doing the same, although
>>> reading Mathew Garret's recent missives on the supposed economic benefit
>>> of GPL violation, perhaps I'm deluded.  It would be nice to prove him wrong.
>> Having just googled the missives you mention, they are basically saying 
>> largely that "it may be hard for incompetent manufacturers to comply 
>> with GPL". The are only two points I would like to raise in response to 
>> his comments:
>>
>> 1) Do we really need manufacturers with that degree of competence? Their 
>> product is likely to be of such poor quality that we are better off 
>> without them.
> 
> That's fine, but a lot of these things are a market for lemons -- the
> customer has no way of determining the quality inside the box, so the
> people that make the cheapest nastiest crap drive the quality producers
> out of business -- particularly when they can steal the software from
> the people that produced it without reciprocating.
> 
> I bought a remote controlled wlan webcam recently -- I am motivated to
> buy GPL compliant kit, and am willing to pay at least twice the price to
> do so, but the combination of manufacturers madly cloning one another's
> devices, and middle-men misrepresenting what they're selling makes it
> pretty much impossible to have any clue what you're likely to get in the
> box, let alone whether it's really possible to rebuild the firmware from
> the sources.  Of course, the cheap clones are really quite poor, which a
> normal consumer should also understand, but only after they've been
> ripped off, and sometimes not even then (judging by the glowing Amazon
> reviews).  I resorted in the end to buying several from Amazon, and
> sending all bar one back, saying that I was doing so because they were
> GPL violating.

I like that idea - a LOT. :)

Gordan