Quote:
Originally Posted by grond
Ok, sorry, I should feel embarrassed. I had only briefly looked at the pdf and then only at the table at the start of it. That seems to be the proposal from Gunnar and Miri for distributing the revenue resulting from V2 sales. The rest of it seems to be Igor's lengthy explanation as to why that offer is unacceptable to him. I will have to read it when I'm not on the phone.
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OK, I have tried to read the pdf but I couldn't. Somewhere on page 3 I stopped paying attention. Obviously there are a lot of hurt feelings. I have seen more of Gunnar's style of communication than most and yes, he is hard to deal with and often hard to bear. However, Igor seems to overestimate the significance of his work by a far. His contributions to the core are close to zero if not nothing at all. He played around with interfacing the core to the Amiga bus, usually couldn't get it to work reliably and then Gunnar and Chris fixed stuff for him. During bring-up of the cards he did some copy-paste stuff of functional units. As to the PCBs, it took lots of revisions, lots of disregarded advice from experienced devs until they got where they are now. It is ridiculous to even imply anything in the V4 could be based on the V2 PCBs. The V2 has SDRAM, the V4 has DDR3. That's already about half of the complexity of the PCBs. The V4 PCBs were designed by Chris, the guy who -- using a lot of patience -- helped Igor make the V2s work. Even if Igor had made the entire PCB design himself, this still amounts to very little in comparison to the work that went into the CPU core. This is illustrated by the fact that there are many FPGA boards (most prominently the various V4s) but no alternative core that would get anywhere near in speed to that of the 080. Several people boasted they could do it but nothing ever saw the light of day. The mere fact that the core can't live without a PCB and the PCB doesn't do anything without the core doesn't mean that both parts are equal in significance. This can be illustrated easily:
Why not take tg68, debug it, make it fully 020 compatible and bring it up to speeds and sell that? Probably because the price of the cards would have to be competitive against 030 cards (that's about what you can get out of tg68, no FPU either) and the drop in price would have to be much more than what Gunnar and Miri want as their share.
Igor also talks a lot about money that went to Gunnar but curiously is very
silent about the amount of money that stayed with him. If the BOM was about 70€ and 50€ were paid to Gunnar, that leaves an enormous amount to Igor. Igor questions whether Gunnar actually parted with some of the money he received and gave anything to other team members but why should Igor be those people' lawyer? What money did he pay to those contributors? I got the following gifts from Gunnar and Miri: two Vampire-branded game controllers, a Vampire-branded mouse-mat, a large discount on my V4 (I paid the full price to Igor for my V600 and my V1200, though), a Vampire-branded cap, a Vampire-branded jacket. I know that similar gifts went to the other team members. For all I know money from card sales is also used to fund attendence of team members at Amiga conventions.
Obviously a lot of this is about money. Money from a joint project needs to be shared and then emotions come into play because each side feels that the amount of money they get should somehow reflect their importance.
However, another factor is that Igor took forever to manufacture cards. He wasted a whole year on constructing a pick-and-place-machine because he wanted to turn his home into a PCB solder house (didn't work out). During all this time not a single V2 was built and sold. He resisted the idea of having the V2 PCBs produced by a professional solder house for years. All this resulted in a very low output of cards and many lost customers. The V4-stand-alone was designed to also work in A500/A1000/A2000 computers and this was to be understood as a threat: get your production running or we will produce accelerator cards ourselves. Just ask yourself: when was it publically stated that Igor retired from the team? How long did it take Igor to now get the next batch of V2 cards into the shops and onto Ebay which got Gunnar to react and resulted in this most recent communication from Igor? One year? Two? Eventually time was up and the V4 series were sold.
Another thing to think about
: why should a one-off payment for a core license somehow guarantee that there would be core updates? And over what period of time? Forever? From a customer's point of view that would be desirable but Igor is out of the deal pretty much the moment he sold the card (yes, he is ace in honouring warranty!).
In the above I take very much Gunnar's side but I do this to add some perspective to this discussion that has all the usual Vampire-haters. It certainly isn't all black and white and not a movie with good guys and bad guys. It's about money and pride and a lot of BS coming from that. You can make this a very complicated thing or a very simple thing: do you want to buy the product for the price, yes or no? No need to make it any more complicated than that. Personally I am very happy with the V1200, my latest revision V600 and my V4SA. The V1200 does not give me much desire to make the step to the Icedrake (also considering the price tag). And that's really all that is my business.