Ok, all sorts of side-projects have emerged for anything from buttons to replacement aluminum fascias to digital output boards. I'm talking of course of projects that have a monetary value associated with them. There have also been countless software projects, such as the excellent Hijack and other programs, but they've (thankfully) been kindly offered up for free by their creators.

Many of us have spent some extra money on these projects or other tweaks for our players. I don't think I'm alone in my willingness to give some (additional) direct compensation back to Rio for a few feature additions. The larger the company, the more complicated proposals like this can get, so I'm hoping there's someone open to developing this idea into a reality.

The simple take: get some additional development time to have builds of carplayer software made from the ever-growing software trunk to add some long-requested functionality and get us out of the alpha stages. Release this software as a paid upgrade. Price TBD. Implement a licencing agreement that does not bind (condemn) Rio or its development staff to an unrealistic support structure (support can often be the killer even if development is a near freebie).

I haven't figured out how much I'd be willing to pay, but from the top of my head, US$50 would be a no brainer.

Thoughts? Think it would be likely we could have 1000 "buyers" at that price?

Bruno

Unfortunately, the people on this BBS aren't the ones you need to talk to.

I suspect that the reason that 3.00 final hasn't been released is more to do with the boys in blue being far too busy with real work and less to do with lack of monetary resources.

One possibility might be to permit certain 3rd parties (say, mlord and tfabris) access to internal version control and bug tracking systems under NDA agreements. This would allow them to report on, update and close bug reports, checkout, edit, commit code and finally tag the repository ready for a release.

This model is used by a number of the big ICT players including Nokia, Motorola and Sun Microsystems. Of course, mlord and tfabris might not be interested in playing release manager or sustaining engineer, even if the community paid them .

I would pay $100 just for Empeg support in Rio Music Manager, my world would then be complete, I have a dream people to bung all my music in a dir on my PC and RioMM sorts the rest out, it does that for everything apart from the Empeg.

Cheers

Cris.

I think this is worth talking about.. at least to get us out of the alpha stage.

Hasn't picking up the tab at the local pub worked in the past? Or was that prior to Rio?

A very interesting idea. So, if $50k would only buy a few months of consultant time, what could be done in that time? empeg for RioMM? ::insane laugh and a twitch:: VR? Or maybe we could pay Patrick to create something new and cool... box under the seat to bluetooth our Karma's into our factory head units. I know, I know, $50k could never afford that.

Hm.... my first thought was, "Save development cost by not paying for support; let us support it." But then, who would debug the closed source program when weird bugs came up. Or would it have to be closed source? Could it be like HiJack and emphatic, providing lots of functionality but still open for (at least someone in) the community to modify?

$50k or some such to simply open source the player software might be interesting. I don't see Rio going for it though.

-Mike

I wasn't proposing bringing in a new contractor nor dedicating anyone to this goal. Just adding some money to the bottom line for a few extra time slices that would be necessary to deliver a certain feature set within a reasonable time period.

It can certainly be done. Opportunity cost as Rob pointed out would also be my guess for biggest concern. How much $$ would it take for someone at Rio/DNNA to entertain the idea of a paid release. Having a specific feature list and a defined schedule is just more comforting. I'm not made of money, but that comfort is worth a few bucks to me. Starting at $50 and moving upward depending on the details of the proposal.

Giving access to an outside party that already has some vested interest in the empeg, under NDA (and likely anti-competetive contract) of course, is also something interesting I hadn't thought of.

I also bring this to this forum where I believe it's as good a place as any for initial exploration. Might as well find out if people would have any interest parting with money while taking some time to find out who would be the right contact at Rio/DNNA to propose the idea to.

Bruno

$50k for the source code is way too cheap. Think about how many years worth of work has gone into it and also the fact that it's still being used in the Karma and other players.

I'm pretty sure the let a third party have access to the code under NDA has come up several times before as well. Oddly I can't find the specific search terms to get the posts back.

Well, I'd do quite a lot for $50k

That said, the design and prototyping is only half the battle, the manufacture is the other half, and the software is the other other half if not three quarters

pca

Personally, I'd be happy with the current V3 but merely bugfixed...

I started this thread on the premise of paying for 3.0, not new (ie. different) player application.

The money would be "padding" aka sweetener. You're not going to hire anyone full-time for $50K. And anyone capable of writing a good replacement player isn't going to do it for that price unless it's also a labour of love for them.

Speaking specifically (because some people are happy with the way it is), I'd really like to have a final/stable release with cross-fading, full soup support (with the ability to opt-out certain criteria, like 1-track artists from the artists list), the concept of an "album" if not already inherent to the soup implementation and the ability for emplode to edit the ID3 data of tracks already on the player (modify player DB, sync and offer the option to update ID3). If I want to get Fancy, I'd LOVE to see some of what Tonyc has provided in Emphatic (custom info screens) built into the player. But that's already doable, so I wouldn't ask for that over the abobve and/or what's already on the table with 3.0 (including features that are being exposed from other projects).

Access by a third party to the source looks like the most interesting, even if not possible, idea. Hey, maybe someone that works for Rio right now would be interested in doing this on their "off" time. Though I imagine that would be a stretch and leave very little time for things like sleep or a life outside work.

If I was independently wealthy I'd bite the bullet, propose this myself, bank-roll it myself and give it to everyone else for free. Or hell, sink a few million into just coming up with a completely new design and then sell it to the board members for the price of a hamburger. It would be money-losing, but would leave some satisfaction for me.

Bruno

I think this is a great idea. It'd be interesting to see how much moola could be raised. I think that if the money actually existed, the fixes would get done, somehow.

In practice, I think there are perhaps 200 people on this BBS who might contribute some amount of money up to US$100 or so for this, maybe averaging around US$75. That would give around US$15000 to work with, I think.

Cheers

Thinking about this some more, a licensing agreement would likely have to also include the ability to sub-license the resulting software to markets outside the car player / portable player / home receiver / non-competitive-with-DNNA markets to qualify as a viable business case. I'd hope that RISCOS Ltd get a significant revenue stream from somewhere other than sales of 3900 upgrades that they quote in their end of year 4 press release (they currently charge ~£85 for the ROM).

I'm finding it difficult to think of something that could benefit from a neat embedded player that DNNA isn't already selling or likely to be working hard to license its technology. DAB / HD Radio player? Unless a significant revenue stream could be made by sub-licensing in-car entertainment solutions.

Why? I think many of us would be happy to have someone with some free time hacking at the empeg codebase with the only intent being to make the empeg software better. I think it would be cool if that group of people could have access to it and allow Rio to utilize thier upgrades, if any. That could conceivably lower the cost. Maybe.

As if it needed to be said, I'd be a willing party in such an arrangement. emphatic is already there for the taking, but I enjoy it enough that I'd be happy to chip in some development work to whatever project may materialize out of this discussion that I could swear we've had about a dozen times.

But did the subject of money come up right from the start? And did it get taken to the next level? (ie. proposed to Rio) I didn't initially think about someone else (outside of Rio emploees) providing coding services because of their unfamiliarity with the project - I'm sure it's a fairly big deal to get familiar enough with the player software to become productive quickly.

Bruno