Hi, has anyone considered impact of the new SMSQ license on new hardware development?
Imagine X has a new hardware and wants to cooperate with Y and Z to get SMSQ running on it. New hardware has no working disk or the likes. The only way to get code onto the system is by ROM. X is allowed to share the sourcecode with Y and Z, but Y and Z do not own a ROM programmer, so that doesn't help much. Everytime a new version is to be used or just tried, a binary on ROM must be distributed. So what happens: 1. X must ask the SMSQ/E registrar to accept his new hardware as an official SMSQ/E target. 2. X must then ask for the latest change to be accepted in the official source tree and binary (which may be rejected.) 4. X must then negotiate a price with an authorized dealer. (This may become a problem because the dealer may personally dislike him.) 5. Y and Z must now purchase the binary from the dealer. 6. X is now allowed to distribute the ROMs to Y and Z, so they can try. 7. X, Y or Z finds the next bug and things restart at 2. The appearance of Flash instead of UV-EPROMS helps a little, but, especially in the early beginning, you have nothing but binaries on ROM to get anything onto your machine. So the new SMSQ license does, in practice, kill any reasonable cooperation in getting it to run on a naked new hardware. I have burned hundreds of ROMs for Q40. Going through the procedure above would have simply been impossible. Bye, Peter
