Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 05:25:36 +0100 From: Tobias Abt Reply-To: picasso@ninemoons.com To: Picasso Mailing List Subject: {PML} Breaking the silence Dear (registered?) Picasso96 users! First, I have to apologize for the lack of development during the last year, but Alex and I have been too busy in our real life to continue to spend a lot of time in the development of a not-so- profitable project. Another pressing problem was that our hardware gets older and older, less reliable each year. Alex' Amiga broke down completely and it took us weeks to conclude that something in there is not reliable anymore, but we could not determine what. So now we have an instable main development system that does not even compile properly. Fine. Just some weeks ago we surrendered and I gave Alex my second Amiga, which was used for testing, to replace his motherboard. As it turns out, this one works better but still not perfectly. Something else is to blame. The hard disk? Or the CyberStorm board? One of the many graphics boards? We don't know yet but one way or the other we will probably have to replace the system completely. This will cost some money. On the other hand, if we look at the registration turnout, especially over the last two years, we have to face the fact that only a handful of people deemed Picasso96 worth enough to send a small amount of money. So who has registered at all? Mostly PicassoII users, some CyberVision64/Merlin/Piccolo users and as far as I can remember not a single one for UAE. Sad but true, people use non-crippled Shareware without bothering to register. Even if you ignore this, all those registrations combined would not even allow us to drink a beer once a week. That's not enough to justify intensive work on Picasso96 while at the same time we could spend our precious spare time with friends and family. We do want to have a life outside of work, too. BTW, we have learned the hard way that Dave Haynies quote "make one error and you have to support it a lifetime" (probably not correctly quoted, sorry, but I don't have it at hand) is just too true... If you say that we have made a lot of money with the PicassoIV, I have to tell you that if you calculate what we would have made working full time for a company, we would have made about five times as much. Both Alex and I have spent two years of full time productive time each on Picasso96 between the summer of '96 and mid '98. So now estimate the value of work behind Picasso96 yourself... Alexander Niven-Jenkins wrote "A number of companies were decent enough to cough up the money...". Set the number to "1". The only one to pay to this day was Village Tronic for the PicassoIV. Ateo did not pay one single French Franc. Ok, they did supply _parts_ of the reference system which to this day does not have actual release boards, just prototypes which we still suspect to have certain bus timing flaws and behave just a bit differently than the actual release versions. But we don't want to be too hard on the Ateo guys. They have invested a lot of money into their project and probably did not even hit the point of breaking even. Some people have written that we should make Picasso96 open source now that we can not work as hard as before. That's actually a good point, but given the situation, no one would ever even bother to pay us any fees to use it commercially. They would simply say "the source is public, anyone can use it". And now try to sue someone with this attitude... It is way too costly and the chances at court are very different in different parts of the world. But we still think that we deserve a fee when someone wants to exploit Picasso96 commercially. Elbox does. So we think they should pay a fee to get support for their product. Some say that the Elbox board isn't just about graphics, that there is ethernet and all other possibilities. Yes, there are other options to use with the Elbox board. BUT! What percentage of buyers will go for ethernet or whatsoever and not for graphics? I have ethernet on my Amigas, too, ok. I use it to connect them to each other and to my PC to exchange data. How often do I use it? About 1-5% of the time at the most. Could I live without ethernet? Sure. Make the same calculations about other possible expansions, it will probably be similar. Now, how often do I use a graphics board when working on the Amiga? 100% of the time. I think it is not too far fetched to assume that 90% of the Elbox buyers have similar priorities and intend to use the system in this way. Ok, there is CyberGraphX for the Elbox, too. It only supports the old Virge that nobody wants to buy these days. If you can choose between the Virge and the Voodoo3, what would you choose? Exactly. So this is no real argument either. And as user registration does not work at all, the only chance for us to get our fee is that Picasso696 is being bundled with hardware. So taking all this into account, the logical conclusion would be to give Elbox a decent discount on Picasso96 and have them distribute it with their system. Stephen Fellner asked whether Elbox contacted us. Yes, they did. They wanted the card driver development kit which is not public and contains informations about our private hardware API that is needed to build a driver. After all, this private API is our intellectual property and must not be used by someone who has not got our o.k. for using it. We told them that we requested a fee which from our point of view was moderately and appropriate. After reading about this, they (Elbox) simply stopped communication with us and secretely developed a driver they either based on reengineering efforts or a pirated copy of the development kit they got from someone else who may have thought he did something good by giving them the chance to build a driver without our help. So, summing it up, Elbox delibrately chose to screw us. Now, from your point of view, should we: a) support the Elbox driver actively, b) ignore it and let Elbox change it accordingly to changes in Picasso96 or c) make sure that this pirated driver will not work with future versions of Picasso96? Well, we are quite pissed off, so we are currently favoring the third option. So, probably, future versions of Picasso might not work on the Elbox system at all (although honestly I have no doubt that Elbox would not be able to hack our countermeasures and - if they intend to - distribute pirated versions of Picasso96 soon after we release new ones). But this is not set in stone yet, as we still hope for Elbox to offer at least a symbolic one-time fee. We are willing to give them some time to reach us and offer something we can be satisfied with. Until then we will step back from any actions whatsoever including Picasso96 updates (sorry about that, but without something in hand, crippling Picasso96 after releasing an even better version, does not make any sense at all). Now let's come to the point of further development of Picasso96. Will there be any? Yes, definetely. We are currently working on it. As a first step we incorporated the changes Thomas Richter has sent us. We owe him much for this and he deserves a public apology from us for not being fast in making his fixes available. We owe you one, Thomas (Du darfst Dir was von uns wünschen, Weihnachten steht vor der Tür!). Is that all? Not at all. We are currently working on other software and hardware driver additions that are unfortunately not ready for distribution yet and that we can not talk about either because other parties are also involved. Just give us some time. You might be surprised (or not, depending on your expectations :-))). You are still reading this mail? Wow! You must be a devoted Picasso96 user, did you register? :-) -- Bye, \|/ Tobias @ @ +----------------oOO-(_)-OOo-----------+ | Tobias Abt | | email: tabt@gmx.de | +--------------------------------------+ ---------