After a fair amount of consideration of all the responses posted here, I have decided, with some regret, to withdraw this proposal. I will not as a result be taking this any further with Hugo to request permission to work on the V3 branch to produce a stable release at Beta quality.

My original goals were:

- to get a job
- pay my bills
- do something I would enjoy
- provide something of use to the community
- remove the load on Hugo and the team

All I really wanted to do was to put an end to the endless complaints about bugs, non-functional RDS and tuners that didn't work: to get this off Hugo's (and Peter's, John G's, Toby's, and everyone else's who has part involvement with the car player software) backs and just let them get on with their jobs, whilst giving us a final, stable release with which we could all be content. This was done purely 'cos of my current circumstances and my uniquely protected status regarding IP with the player. It was driven somewhat by seeing the succesful result of a similar effort by Poul Henning-Kamp on the BSD kernel and core distribution which finished recently. I thought: well, why not for empeg? Unforch - and to my great disappointment - it's not going to be possible. There is insufficient interest, motivation, or funding (even at the relatively economical levels I would have been prepared to accept - I did not see one single post asking for an overall expected cost for this proposal) to make this work. Instead of a "Yeah! let's do it!" spirit, there was a rapid sideways diversion into IP and open source. Completely missed the point, people. Waste of time.

To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement. This thread has completely disintegrated and lost focus. There has been little real comprehension, or visionary understanding, of what I had intended. I suspect a lot of it came from me not being very clear and up-front about my intentions. I'll have to learn from this. However, it has become apparent from a few strategic postings what is likely to happen in the next few months, and that my proposal would (as like as not) cause problems with this. I would still like to be surprised, but I doubt that I will be. Hence, it's time to (dis)gracefully withdraw.

As pessimistic as this all sounds, I have been getting the feeling recently that this community is gradually disintegrating and slipping away. The long time owners and posters are disappearing: the torch is diminishing. The discussions becoming less focussed on the player and more on trivia. There is more and more repetition, and the FAQ is being read less and less. It's a repetition of what I have seen happen on the Dragon scene, the Atari scene, OS-9 (and I will leave you knowledgeable ones to work out which one I mean), Acorn and Archimedes, DOOM, and numerous other things I've been interested in over time that have - gradually - just faded away. Perhaps I always choose the wrong thing to be interested in, I dunno.

So what's going to happen to this wonderous beast that has affected all our lives? It will struggle on with perhaps one more (nearly) fixed release, and the number of active users will gradully diminish with more and more players being shelved over time. There will be a gradual loss of interest as the spares pool gets smaller, and catastrophic damage to players will be - just that, irreparable. It's going to die, and it's time we got realistic about it.

For myself, I have now started off with something new to keep me interested. I'm not bailing out - the empeg will always hold a place in my heart for the change it has brought to my life - but it is, nonetheless, time to move on.

You too....