[Oberon] Hardware versus software development.

[skulski at pas.rochester.edu]

Joerg:

> I only wanted to say that we have to look at the overall cost
> not only at the HW cost. I live in a country where a man hour
> is expensive. Spending man hours to write a non-trivial driver
> just to be cheap on the HW side might end up with a higher total cost.

This is going to be an open-source, open-hardware project. The idea is
that the community contributes their work for free. The HW cannot be free
because the PCB, the assembly, and the parts must be paid off, plus some
reasonable profit to pay back for ordering the parts etc. The HW is meant
to enable the community contributors. Those, who want their time to be
compensated, must look somewhere else.

If this is well executed then it may eventually generate cash flow to
those involved, in this way or another. There may be a commercial
potential in this kind of projects, but one has to realize where it is
hiding. I guess ETH never realized this part...

Wojtek