The KDE Improv Project Has Announced Its End

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The KDE Improv Project Has Announced Its End

The team behind the KDE Improv ARM development board that was supposed to run Mer and be a great open-source piece of hardware is no more. The developers have sent out an email to their backers that they've thrown in the towel...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTczMjA

[xeekei]

I had no idea Aaron Seigo had that kind of money. Does he own a company, or what?

[Luke_Wolf]

I had no idea Aaron Seigo had that kind of money. Does he own a company, or what?

I'm pretty sure at this point the term would be *owned* a company, that he crashed into the ground horribly known as Make-Play-Live, despite having everything going for him.

[blackout23]

I had no idea Aaron Seigo had that kind of money.

Well he lives in Z?rich, which isn't exactly the cheapest place to live.

[[Knuckles]]

I had no idea Aaron Seigo had that kind of money. Does he own a company, or what?

It's probably savings + maybe some lending? Sometimes you just risk it all for what you believe in, and sometimes it just doesn't work out.

Aaron has made excellent contributions to advancing KDE, Qt and OSS in general. I really wish him the best and hope people around here can recognize that you fall before you learn to walk.

Hope to see some cool new idea from him soon

[mitcoes]

Why not making a vivaldi at Intel X86_64 SoCs?

I do not understand why using ARM32 having now easier for GNU/LInux Intel x86 SoCs to make a competitive tablet?

Also why do not them try to sell this project to Russia nad their new ARM64 "national SoC project" I am sure russians would be interested a lot in tablets that do not use Android MS WOS or IOS and are really open source.

I do not know how to send them this 2 suggestions that being so different they can make bot happen

[riklaunim]

I do not understand why using ARM32 having now easier for GNU/LInux Intel x86 SoCs to make a competitive tablet?

When they started that project x86 didn't existed on tablets. They even used low end Allwinner A20 instead now minimal quad core Allwinner or Rockchip.

Also why do not them try to sell this project to Russia nad their new ARM64 "national SoC project" I am sure russians would be interested a lot in tablets that do not use Android MS WOS or IOS and are really open source.

There is nothing to sale. There is no patents or "intellectual properties". Mer is OpenSource.

[oliver]

I really really do not understand how this could have failed. The Improv was a board around the EOMA68. The EOMA68 was based on the A10 and A20 SoC. The A10/A20 has an excellent and well supported community around it. The A10/A20 runs plain old linux (and android). There's Fedora for the A-series, there's debian, there's Ubuntu. Many many tablets (pengpod) that are really really cheap use A10/A20/A13 which are all very well supported by the linux-sunxi community and can run all the aforementioned distro's.

Yes they could use a lot of work in the driver department, but that aside, it works.

So they could have used the pengpod (and helped that project, which was really also just about re-selling cheap china tablets) or use any cheap china tablet based on these SoC's and be done with it.

But this was about opensource hardware? They where struggeling with hitting the numbers to do mass production? Did they even concider olimex? Olimex does opensource Hardware. They have several A10, A20 and A13 based dev boards, much like what the Improv+eoma68 are. The OLinuxino Lime is smaller then a r-pi and costs about the same AND opensource hardware! Yay.

So how could this have failed? How is this even possible? Why didn't the porting happen op a different A10 based platform (cubieboard/OLinuXino) and then source some tablet, transfer it to it, done. (I know it sounds easier then done )

With the previous post, about the eoma/improv thing going bust, I can think that's there where most of the resources got wasted.

How did this cost 200k from aaron alone? I don't understand. Did you know that the Lime appearantly has sold more then the r-pi? ... Go figure.

[brent]

Did you know that the Lime appearantly has sold more then the r-pi? ... Go figure.

I find this extremely hard to believe. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has sold over 3 million boards by now. If Olimex had sold more than that, we'd hear about their boards everywhere, but we don't. In fact there isn't really a community around these Olimex boards, they don't appear to be popular at all.

[oliver]

I find this extremely hard to believe. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has sold over 3 million boards by now. If Olimex had sold more than that, we'd hear about their boards everywhere, but we don't. In fact there isn't really a community around these Olimex boards, they don't appear to be popular at all.

There actually IS a community around it, olimex has its own forums, linux-sunxi community also works with that community.

Appearantly, the lime has sold over 3.3 million allready. Probably not all to home users/makers though I guess?

And the r-pi has been around for 3 years now? So it took some momentum for it to be widespread and heavily used. Give it a while for makers to adapt a new board to be popular.

(disclaimer: the 3.3 mil is straight from olimex themselves, so take that as you will).