From: Simon Muller (smullers_at_tiscali.nl)
Date: Fri Oct 24 2003 - 03:41:48 PDT
There are many more people offering hardware on this list. To begin
with people who sell the Newtons and Emates themselves.
Then there are the ones that sell dongles and cards.
No one ever commented on someone's rights to sell them. Only the
quality of the service is judged.
Then there are the ones that make hardware modifications on their
machines (and for you on request.), like dongledestroyers in several
forms published on personal websites ( long before PCBman's Ser card
saw light), audio dongles, memory upgrades, speed accelerators and
earphone connectors. Those are the inventive members of this list.
Now that there's 2 people who announce Emate uprades, suddenly there
are these questions on who has more rights to make them and sell them
to others.
Pcbman claims his is original, Ferdi claims he copied a known working
board.( to convince people that it is working properly?) Some blame him
for copying.
But how original can someone's design be, when the resulting hardware
has to function as an extension in a machine that is already there?
Take the dongle destroyer:
Serial ports use chips. The one that is in the Newton, dictates how the
wires should be connected to the connector.
The hole in the inside of the Newton dictates where the connector
should be.
Same goes for memory extensions.
The original design of the machine dictates what chips fit and which
don't, and how they should be wired to fit the extension connector.
If Newertech's, PCBman's or Ferdi's or mine( if I were to make one) or
anyone's memory extension, they may look yellow, green or brown, the
wires will have to go from pin a to pin b etc. in order to function.
That scheme has been decided at the time the Newton was designed.
In my opinion the only one who really has copyrights in these
matters,is the maker of the Newtons, ie. Apple.
All others should get kudos for patiently retro-designing all the wires
and sharing their findings with others. Be it free or for a reasonable
price.
And if there's more than one doing the same thing, that's fine in my
view. It keeps prices of the resulting hardware realistic.
Simon Muller
On donderdag, okt 23, 2003, at 15:53 Europe/Amsterdam, Robert Benschop
wrote:
> Now I don't a fair bit of competition, but why do the two people that
> offer hardware solutions on this list offer the same item?
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