Chitech CT-PC89E - 8.9in ARM netbook with linux kernel, u-boot and new linux distro "MOS"

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 4:39 PM, Quiliro Ordóñez <quiliro at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>   and they've chosen the path of "fear" rather than "trust".
>>
> If they will not comply they have no fear.

 not fear of us - fear of the competition eating their investment.

> Will you please copy the contents
> of the pertinent parts of the emails in this thread so we can suggest a
> course of action by estimating their motivations based on their messages?

 there's quite a few!  but it boils down / summarises as above.  ok -
neil asked some questions, but i wasn't sure if he replied direct to
me on purpose, i've asked him if it was accidental to forward what i
sent to him, here.

 my friend adam has been the point-of-contact with chitech: he's been
summarising the messages to me (i say summarising, but some of our
skype calls have been an hour long!) and forwarding some to me.

 i'll ask him what he wants to do [send messages here].  the reason
why i say that is because we're not looking for a "fight", we actually
_want_ to make money selling affordable arm netbooks (with free
software on them of course) and this is just the very first decent one
we've been able to find.

 so in some ways there's a bit of a decision to be made: do we decide to:

 a) blast chitech with gpl-violations, get the source code and then do
_exactly_ what chitech fears will happen: find an alternative
competitor and put MOS onto an alternative competitor's netbook.

 b) negotiate hard with chitech, threaten them with gpl-violations,
get the source code, improve it, merge it upstream and give it back to
them.

 c) forget the whole thing and find an alternative product, which
won't be long in happening (i give it about 2-3 months and there'll be
another 2, and by year-end there could well be 10-20 9in and 10in ARM
netbooks).

 i prefer b) but the window of opportunity is closing fast, meaning
that we'll end up going c) simply by default if this goes on for too
long.

 l.