Hi,

This ongoing discussion, despite the wealth of personal arguments, has clarified a lot of details for me as an enthusiast and potential customer.

Ever since I heard about the Spark tablet I truly believed this would dramatically change the playing field of FOSS and FOS-hardware. Hearing about the underlying EOMA-board adheres to this vision, where this would be the new standard in FOS-land and the overall maker-community.

As far as I understand it, over time some other SoC's have already been re-engineered. In addition the recent RaspberryPi-board and the crowd-sourced Novena board have closed in on the proposition of the EOMA-board. However the EOMA-board still seems to hold a place of its own for compactness and power.

In my job I've got to get a glimpse of the embedded-hardware development business and knowing now about development costs involved, it is truly heartbreaking to see this project in this state. I believe the potential is still there, the hard work has been done, it just takes a great launch to bootstrap production, community adoption and even further development.

As for the launch Improv didn't cut it for me as a potential customer. The lack of detailed communication and the strong focus on the make-play-live proposition (which to me seems limited and seems to go against the hacker market). And above all, I just wanted to have a FOS-tablet to play with, not an offering similar to my RaspberryPi (which I even hardly use).

Say the EOMA-board would run a crowdfunding effort to start commercial development, what would be a good proposition? To me it seems to be a tablet combination, to also aid in the FOSS development (like make-play-live).

Personally I could see the board earn a place on it's own, by being a great replacement for the RaspberryPi, specically for other RaspberryPi-projects for which the RaspberryPi is just a way of achieving a service, like: Generic fileserver (NAS), Owncloud-instance, ArkOS install (multiple local services), XBMC-player or Android-player (say for games, probably requiring Replicant Android). Others might even be: 3D-printer-driver, VJ-visual generator (like the M-Labs m1), Freedombox (although currently in development and requiring an additional network interface), home-automation or parallel processing using multiple boards. One of the main benefits of the EOMA-board is the fact that it can easily be handled by regular users, without fearing ESD-problems. The Improv-board, despite offering decent breakouts, doesn't adhere to this user-level, still requiring an additional case.

Considering that like me others saw a place for this development but didn't fully support for various reasons, it might be worth another try to find the required support for this to take off. Say by preparing and starting a crowdfunding campaign offering the EOMA-boards, various breakouts (Improv-type breakout with option of a plastic case, NAS-enclosure with HDD-space, tablet (with room for batteries)) linked to various donation levels, paid pre-installation as a way of turning time into money and finally products like mugs and t-shirts.

Even though I'm not fully emerged into the FOSS-community, I believe the Novena project has set an example by creating social presence even before launching the crowdfunding campaing by initially demonstrating skill (overall blog and SD-card analysis) and next showing off the product (e.g. Chaos Communication Congress). This makes me believe that with proper marketing and having a great offer, the community will at least consider supporting this 'project' and better yet fully fund the project. Seeing the EOMA-board as the underlying basis for further efforts, I believe Luke should be (involved in) initiating such an effort, despite all politics involved in the recent debates.

(hope I didn't fuel a rant with this e-mail).

Kind regards, Nico Rikken, NL