On Thursday, May 1, 2014 12:08:02 PM UTC-6, Gerald wrote: > > I see. One of those commercial guys. I thought so. > > You say that like it is a negative thing. I can almost hear the sigh afterwards.
I don't understand your resentment of commercial users. You have done a masterful job designing a board with lots of CPU power, and flexible I/O. You then decided to build the board in large volume to push the selling price as low as possible. The design is open and well documented so it is easy to work with. It is also well supported by both the community and TI. The same features that make it appealing to your hobbyist audience also make it appealing to potential commercial users. I understand that some commercial users have put a strain on your production capacity, but you are selling through distributors like Avnet, Arrow, Digi-Key and Mouser that primarily deal with commercial customers. These customers expect to be able to buy products from them in volume. If you had only sold through the likes of Adafruit, Sprkfun, and Jameco I suspect you would not have had this problem, but the BBB also wouldn't be the successful product it has become. I suspect that you may resent commercial users for making profits off your design without paying you directly for it. This is the same issue faced by anyone doing open hardware or software development. IBM has made a lot of money selling Linux systems without paying the Linux developers for their software. On the other hand IBM has contributed a great deal of expert time and effort to Linux development. I think a similar thing is happening with the BBB. TI provides a lot of support to the Beaglebone community to encourage the adoption of their Sitara processors in commercial products. Given the good design, relatively low price, and direct support by TI, some of those commercial users will chose to use the BBB. They do so because they can't build their own custom board for anywhere near the cost of the BBB, principally because of the volume production. But that production volume is, in large part, supported by those very same commercial users. Perhaps the BBB is, or was, under priced as some have said. I think it will still be a good value at $55. I don't think things would have been much different if the original price had been higher, unless it was so much higher that it was no longer attractive to the hobbyist users either. Hobbyist weren't running out to buy the TI EVM boards before the BBB became available, because they simply cost too much. I also think that you will get a lot of community support from commercial users in the long run. I try to answer questions on the forums when I can. I am still learning myself, so I try to refrain from answering unless I know the answer. Commercial use means there will be users who have HAD to get things to work, and they will be able to guide others through their struggles with the same issues. I know this is getting somewhat off topic, but I thought it was worth saying. Commercial users aren't inherently bad guys. Dennis Cote -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beagleboard+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
