[Arm-netbook] The future of EOMA-68

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 10:11 AM, Boris Barbour <boris.barbour at ens.fr> wrote:
>
>
> On 05/05/2015 10:54 AM, Simon Kenyon wrote:
>>
>>
>> this is NOT a troll
>>
>> i think it was sometime in 2011 that the eoma-68 concept was defined.
>>
>> i do realise that luke and others have put a lot of effort into this but
>> it has been a very long time and i still can't buy anything
>
>
> That's how long it takes for (mostly) one person to do something this
> complex.
>
>> is it not time to reevaluate the project, its goals and objectives?
>
>
> That's happened several times.
>
> Money would speed things up a lot

 yes it would.  and word-of-mouth marketing, as well as inviting
people to contribute here, even $1 a week would help:

 https://gratipay.com/luke.leighton/

 one thing, when compared to say the OpenPandora and other projects
that have been crowd-funded *in advance*, is that the approach i've
taken has much more integrity and far less risk.

 iet's look at say the OpenPandora.  they were very *very* close to
becoming unprofitable, esp. after investing $USD 50,000 to an R.F.
Engineer who ended up giving them unsuccessful advice.  in the end
they had to actually assemble the units with volunteer work, in a shed
(literally) because the assembly labour was beyond the budget because
they'd spent it all.

 ... if there had been any other unsuccessful R&D efforts they would
have *not been successful* - the entire project would have been
jeapordised.

and we know of several crowd-funded "from scratch" projects that have
actually gone that way, and failed.

those projects are presented as "pay in advance, you'll probably get
your product... which we haven't even designed or prototyped yet so we
don't know very much or if this will work".

...which strikes me as incredibly dishonest.

so this is why kickstarter and indiegogo both changed their rules, and
crowdsupply has been set up *specifically* that you *must* have a
working prototype *before* the campaign can start.

i complained one hell of a lot about these changes of rules, initially
(what's the damn point when you want to crowd-fund a product's R&D so
you can *get* working prototypes???)

but, in hindsight, i realised that actually it's much more honest to
ask "help fund the R&D phase" as *completely separate* from "help fund
the up-front manufacturing" which although it's a heck of a lot of
details is actually much more straightforward and a lot less risky.

so for those people who *know* that they're funding an R&D phase, they
can go "hmm, yep i can spare $1 per week for that, it's nothing to me,
but i realise that enough people giving $1 per week would make a huge
difference overall.  i don't even want anything in return - just
knowing that i'm funding these efforts is enough payment for me".

*instead* of "here's $100, now GIVE ME MY CROWD-FUNDED PRODUCT or
ELSE" which... yeah, you know the drill - the number of people who are
disappointed to find that they've paid for an expensive open and
publicised learning experience instead of an actual product.

l.