Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2793 from 2006/3/21
From: Northern Calif...
Quote:
Andreas_Wolf wrote:
> there must be a way to prohibit the commercial use of the hardware designs
Prohibiting commercial use would be incompatible with the open source hardware concept:
I misunderstood the purpose of the design group. I incorrectly thought that after the design was completed and tested, which confirmed that it was ready for production, then the community interested in having such a laptop would fund the production through Kickstarter, or some other crowd funding mechanism. That to me seems like a more likely way to get the laptops produced, since no sane company is going to go out on a limb and produce hundreds of PPC laptops, unless they are done on a prepaid, pre-order basis, with a minimum number of committed buyers, before the manufacturer would agree to the production run.
ACube might be crazy enough to fund a small production run, if they have a commitment from Hyperion to port AmigaOS4.1FE to it, but seeing how long it takes Hyperion to complete a port of AmigaOS4.1FE to new hardware, like the X5000 and Tabor A1222 boards, any company would have to be worried that they might be waiting years before AmigaOS4.1FE for their product was completed.
I don't know if the MorphOS Dev. Team members would be interested in porting MorphOS3.10 to a new PPC laptop, or if they are instead going full steam ahead working on porting MorphOS to x64 hardware, and don't want to spend any more of their time working on yet another PPC piece of hardware. I guess if the work to port to the new PPC laptop was minimal, they might be interested, or if the port to x64 is so far out that having MorphOS3.10 on a new laptop design makes good sense, the team would wish to do the port as a last stop gap hardware choice, while the community waits for the x64 port to be completed.
So, IMO, crowd funding of some kind, is the most likely way to get a PPC laptop produced. I hope the group working on this design has not only chosen a layout that fits a currently produced x64 laptop, but they have talked to the company producing the laptop cases, LCD displays, keyboards, track pads, etc., etc., to determine that they can purchase those components, without the x64 motherboard, at a reasonable price, in low quantities. To go through all this work and request funding from the community just to end up with 5 or 10 prototype laptops, is a waste of time, money and effort, as well as good will from the community, who obviously wish to have one of these PPC laptops for themselves.
MorphOS - The best Next Gen Amiga choice.