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On 23/09/10 10:15, Simon Waters wrote:
On 23/09/10 08:01, tom wrote:What license fees???In previous ventures the Indian government charged manufacturers ~1,000,000 USD for hardware license to build devices they've paid for the development of. But it is kind of irrelevant, the design will have cost a certain amount, that isn't included in the $35 figure. Sure if the Indian government wants to move that cost to the taxpayer it is their choice.What software costs???Someone has to make and keep it working, fix bugs, ensure releases work correctly.Have you never heard of FLOSS?Yes, but it isn't free of costs just freely redistributable. If someone else was making this software work on your hardware, then the marginal cost could be low (although it doesn't sounds like that is happening), but it isn't a zero cost item, one still needs to install it, test it, track and fix bugs, distribute updates. None of this is priced in the USD 35 price tag announced because it isn't a retail price, or even a finished product price. The next stage to 100,000 devices is costing the government 6.3 million, so there is $63 dollars per device already. Okay some of that cost may be reduced per item if they produce more of them, but a lot of it will be per item cost.
Bad accounting Look at it as 6.3 cents per unit for 100million sales over 4 or 5 years.Though 99% of the drivers on my machine are open source and I can almost guarantee that if you made it the open source drivers would be done in a couple of weeks - there's nothing new here that $6.3 million will be pissed up the wall by managers and advisors and lawyers - the capitalists!
Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq