End of all TF (Amiga) projects

[darksun9210]

i'm really sorry to hear that it's gone this way. seems to be the curse of amiga-land. one of the hydra's heads eats her own babies. however. i think one of the terriblefire legacies is that it's shown us that now, we CAN do it. It IS possible.

I for one am now learning to solder, and have a couple of (completely passive) simple board designs on the blocks for things i've always wanted, but never thought possible
unfortunately, it's shown me how poor my eyesight really is for the small stuff, but hey, my new glasses can do a 2x optical zoom as well. hows that for an upgrade! but now-a-days, having a production run doesn't have to be in the thousands of boards to be do-able, on a budget of millions.

i managed to get a TF330 off of Supadupa. as previously, I'd relegated my CD32 to a mild curiosity, but the TF330 has put it front and centre in the thick of things again.

Thanks to everyone involved, and my continued thanks to those with the talent and will to use their precious free time to have made/make these things for us all. I dunno what else to say, but i wish all the best for the future, and i've really enjoyed seeing and watching TF develop, even if i don't have the skills to assist directly. Thanks again Stephen for all your time and dedication. I need to send up some alcoholic beverages to your general vicinity!

[sampedenawa]

Very sorry to have to see this kind of things, in a relatively "small", close and fair community as the Amiga enthusiasts.

Unfortunately, a bunch of a few people can't help but behave like jackals, pouncing on every single prey (could be money, notoriety, ...) they smell.

Speaking about my own experience, at the time I released my HID2AMI project, leaving the hardware open but keeping the firmware closed protected, I received a number of complains from "open source purists" (besides: not any of them proved me he ever released anything open sourced) blaming me to have a greedy aptitude against the community.

As I was thinking, time has proved I was right: I received along time every kind of extravagant request, starting from *commercial* makers/resellers who wanted to grant me a $1 (!!) fee for each board they would eventually build & sell in "the name of the community", up to people loudly asking the firmware for free because "everyone could write it in a couple days, so there's no point in keeping it closed" (yes, it was real !).

At the moment, I am counting a couple of clone makers (both authorized by me), and a few derivative projects all making use of my basic hardware schematics plus a free porting of the firmware, agreed with the project maker, which I am happy to give away to whoever who asks for.
No illicit clones around, and both happy users and makers ... maybe "in medio stat virtus" as my latin ancestors said


@Gorack: I'm one of enthusiast users of your 1541 project. I'm very interested in upgrading its potential; I really hope you would consider -as other user already said here- to start sharing some more of you work here !

[exxos]

@sampedenawa All sounds about right. It's the old story that people never take into account development costs of things either. All people can see is a very cheap end product which is not worth that much.. Some never consider maybe the creator had to buy thousands of pounds worth of stuff to get the project to that stage.. Plus never mind all the unpaid time involved.

[exxos]

I'm going to summarise and roundup things here now.

I read some things on ppa where the moderators are not understanding the full story of what is going on anymore. I'm not looking to stir this up or create any more friction between anyone, but I think because of all the posts, a lot of people are not really understanding what has happened properly.

TF had issues with shipping to Poland because of bad Postal Service where he got abuse from people because packages were not turning up. Later he decided not to ship to Poland because the Postal Service was terrible. To which he got even more abuse to the point he cancelled all orders and did not want to deal with shipping any more. I took over distribution at that point, so nobody had grounds to complain as I was shipping worldwide.

The guy "Bound" ordered it seems 20 boards from my store with the whole intention , I assume, reselling them, but later allegedly cloned them out of pure spite towards TF, calling him racist that he would not deal with the Polish people. I don't know how you can be racist against the whole country, but it was not the people anyway, it was the postal system.

I might add here also, if half the packages I was shipping to Poland (or anywhere in the world for that matter) got lost, I would just simply stop shipping them myself also, at least until the issues were resolved. Further to my point, Some USA sellers on ebay do not ship to UK and I don't start accusing them of racism. If it was such a big problem, eBay would force everyone to ship worldwide, but they do not. Sellers have the right decide where they want their products to be shipped or not. In any case, shipping of TF's products still happened to Poland and the rest of the world via my UK store.

It also turns out that "Bound" has also been cloning other people's boards as well. So it seems the whole racism thing which is simply an excuse to rip off somebody's work, as he was doing it already anyway. I'll also add here that racism is of course not tolerated here. We judge people on if they are a asshole or not, not ethnic background.

While we was investigating this, we suspected a leak on JLC as we thought it was more likely than someone going to the effort of cloning a board when it was due to be open sourced in a few months anyway. While we could not prove a leak on JLC, we have however proven that there has been a security issue on JLC's site (where someone could indeed obtain ANY files from anyone) , which myself and TF reported and now seems to have been fixed. Some people on PPA seem to think this was all made up, but it was not! and that security issue was there and there's now been fixed.

I suggest we all just move on now, and get back to what we all love doing with our retro computers!