After a couple PM's on this topic I figure I need to make an explicit announcement.

Due to the lack of reliability of the three iLiad's I've received from iRex (2 DOA's and 1 failed) I have ceased all development for the iLiad. Mark it down as three strikes and they're out, especially with the $100's of USD I've had to pay for shipping on DOA replacements. I'm not pouring any more money into repairing the unit as I've lost all confidence in the reliability of the iLiad hardware. And frankly I'm also tired of listening to them keep making excuses for missed promises.

On advice of legal counsel, my iLiad is not available for purchase.

I will not be maintaining any of the software I've posted. I will not be releasing anything that was under development e.g rtf viewer etc... So please don't ask, I'm attempting to move on.

I'm presently shifting back to Sony Reader development, the dream that was the iLiad is now yesterday's flowers to me.

This is sad news...

Yes, it is very sad news with all the hopes there were for the iLiad. Maybe in time they will pull it together. But in the midst of the darkness, there is also the really exciting news for Sony Reader owners that Scotty will be "presently shifting back to Sony Reader development".

Scotty.... I would certainly understand if you prefer not to say, but I'm curious why selling your iLiad would be a legal issue?

I empathize you scotty on your bad fortune with the hardware. I can consider myself lucky that i had no issues with the hardware as of yet.

It is very sad news that you have completely given up development.
Im hoping that another enthusiast will step up and take it from where u have left it.

I thank you for all the effort you put into the iLiad for the benefit of us all, and wish you good luck with your future endeavours!

Will you be focusing on something for the Sony Reader too ? PDF ?

That is a very sad news, but I understand your reasons, irex should have keept better consideration fo an active developer like you and send you a brand new iliad free.
Bad news for the iliaders good news for the sony ereaders :) (no more e-mail reader 4 iliad :()
Bye
:)

I can totally sympathize too, three strikes and you're out (especially in a row!). I also think that it's a bunch of BS that they charged you for shipping on their broke product. A company should have enough integrity in their product and support for their customer-base to foot shipping costs of their broken/DOA products.

IMO, in the end it's their loss, as you could've drawn more customers their way with the development you would have put into their product. Sorry for the rant, but I not much for deadbeat business practices; i.e., own up to your product (all companies).

As others stated, on the lighter side it will be nice to have another dev working for the Reader side of the house. Can't wait to try out your code!

That is a very sad announement. :.-( But i can totally understand your decision.
I hope, you will come back to the iLiad, when iRex comes to their senses.
Meanwhile have fun with the reader ;)

Sad times for all iLiad users... :sweatdrop
But happy times for all Reader users! :drummer:

After a couple PM's on this topic I figure I need to make an explicit announcement.
Due to the lack of reliability of the three iLiad's I've received from iRex (2 DOA's and 1 failed) I have ceased all development for the iLiad. Mark it down as three strikes and they're out, especially with the $100's of USD I've had to pay for shipping on DOA replacements. I'm not pouring any more money into repairing the unit as I've lost all confidence in the reliability of the iLiad hardware. And frankly I'm also tired of listening to them keep making excuses for missed promises.


I am sorry to hear about that however I do like to reply to your post to clear up somethings.

Together with many other mobileread members you were one of the first to order an in iLiad and initially we did have a few DOA's and you were very unfortunate to receive two in a row. However each time we did our best to ship you a replacement at the soonest.

Your current iLiad is still under warranty so if there is a hardware failure, I recommend to contact out Tech Support center so we can solve it.

Regarding the costs related with one of the returns, there was a misunderstanding and we have offered to settle that bill but never received an answer from you.

and finally, we did offer you an iLiad for developing purpose but this you rejected.


With the means we have, we do try to support our developer community, I think the shell access is a good example here and we still have a few more things on the horizon for those interested to develop for the iLiad.

Anyway I wish you the best with future development project.

regards
Karel

scotty1024, this is a very sad announcement, what a set-back for all iLiad fans.
"2 DOA's and 1 failed": what a crap game, I can understand you. This shouldn't be normal.
It's your decision what you do in your leisure time, so I have to accept your decision.

For me it's still complicated to get my feet wet in development for iLiad.
Yes, I have written some command line binaries for test purpose, but modding & porting apps with gui is another story.
I tried to compile & link design256's Gnu Chess port and found some problems.
I will never learn how scotty got the matrix effect & 2-colours-mode in ipdf5.

A great amount of knowledge of porting & modding apps for iLiad got lost. What a sad week.

Gents, enough grief. If scotty1024 has decided to move on, fine, it's not good, but that's way it is. And there are always two sides to the story (see Karel's post).

My grandpa always used to say: "The grass is always greener on the other side, or at least it appears so." - so be happy with your Sony. I'm happy with my Iliad.

scotty1024:
we hope you can come back in iliad...

I'm sad to hear that Scotty1024 has stopped developing for the Iliad.

He did tremendous work in a very short time and we'll sure miss out a lot of interesting stuff for the Iliad without him in the dev. section.

Maybe the Sony Reader developers section will now see more action, or perhaps we'll soon need a STAReBOOK developer section since there has been some interest on both sides (Scotty and staretek) for developing a PDF reader on the STAReBOOK...I hope that perhaps some day we'll have a developer for the Iliad with the same skill as Scotty to pick up where he left off and help the Iliad become more complete.

And there are always two sides of the medal.....

Before deciding to buy an Iliad, I was looking in this forum. From all the threads one could really think the Iliad sucks. But it does not! It's a great device and does a good job. I am looking for the next update, too - but more because I am curious not because I need it actually - the Iliad does everything I expect.

I guess Scotty did a good job (for some of you), but he was a hype! I did not need all the developments. I admit, I tried the HP48 Emu - but my real HP48 is much better!

So try to keep fair. Scotty decided to focus his development on the Sony reader - that is his very own decision. For the Sony users this might lead to the impression that the Sony reader needs further development. And it is a great chance for the Iliad to gain ground again.

Farewell Scotty...

let the egg hatch again - relax ... the iliad is a banana hardware, it grows at the customer (you would call it beta - if it would be a software product ;o).

Wow, after reading Karel's reply I think I need to retract some of the venom I directed about intergrity & support. Sorry guys/gals!

I agree, Karel did the right thing to apologize and offer assistance to Scotty. My favorite scenario would be for Scotty to continue developing on the iLiad, and at the same time do his magic on the Sony Reader and possibly other future readers (like the STAReBook) as well :crowngrin

I agree, Karel did the right thing to apologize and offer assistance to Scotty. My favorite scenario would be for Scotty to continue developing on the iLiad, and at the same time do his magic on the Sony Reader and possibly other future readers (like the STAReBook) as well :crowngrin

LOL we should leave some free time to scotty for something that is not developing :) :D

Karel did seem to be offering everything Scotty wanted. I wonder where the communication breakdown was? Because I don't think Scotty was getting iRex's messages about being willing to reimburse for shipping, based on his own posts. My own experience is that email can be a difficult way to resolve such issues. With so much spam flying around the net, a lot of email gets lost or inadvertently blocked.

Scotty was down to his last defense. He's proven his seriousness about the possibilities of this tool. The luck and treatment he got were unfair. Karel woke up in time but I hope for Irex it's not too late.

This site is one that promoted the Iliad a bigger way that was thought. Scotty's last move would have shaken them down drastically.

I just hope Scotty, that you'll give it an other chance, if only for the fact that the Iliad was the first out ! :sad:

I guess Scotty did a good job (for some of you), but he was a hype!

I wouldn't go as far as to say that... But I think there's more to this than meets the eye... But it is a pity that Scotty won't be opening up his contributions, especially the rtf reader and the bluetooth stack, but I appreciate he must be feeling quite bitter about this... :(

Scotty was down to his last defense. He's proven his seriousness about the possibilities of this tool. The luck and treatment he got were unfair. Karel woke up in time but I hope for Irex it's not too late.


Well there is always an other side to each story, but I do not believe it would be constructive to go into details about this.

But the offers that were mentioned in my previous post on this topic were offered some time ago to Scotty, so we weren't sleeping :wink:

Actually: the offer for the development iLiad was made at the same time that we didn't want to open up JTAG access (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8723). I have never received any reaction to that email.

It's funny how in the era of such advances in electronic communications how so many messages get lost in transit (or so it seems);

Everyone has free choice, but no doubt that Scotty's presence & contributions will be missed.

And there are always two sides of the medal.....

Before deciding to buy an Iliad, I was looking in this forum. From all the threads one could really think the Iliad sucks. But it does not! It's a great device and does a good job. I am looking for the next update, too - but more because I am curious not because I need it actually - the Iliad does everything I expect.

I guess Scotty did a good job (for some of you), but he was a hype! I did not need all the developments. I admit, I tried the HP48 Emu - but my real HP48 is much better!

So try to keep fair. Scotty decided to focus his development on the Sony reader - that is his very own decision. For the Sony users this might lead to the impression that the Sony reader needs further development. And it is a great chance for the Iliad to gain ground again.

Farewell Scotty...

Applause ! Very well said, and so true.

scotty's leaving is very sad! I say this even though I have a sony reader, and not an Iliad. I was hoping for scotty/iRex/others to improve the iliad software, specifically battery life, suspend, and djvu support, so I could get the iliad with its high resolution screen.

I have been following the iliad for a long time, and even with Karel's comments, I have to put a lot of the blame on iRex. Development for the iliad has been an uphill battle from the beginning. It started even before the iliad was released, but after release, iRex seemed to really try to do their best to keep developers off the iliad. Starting with the lack of inclusion of an easy way to reflash it when stuck. Closing the iliad so that logging in and file access was impossible. The continuing battle with the developers, closing every loophole the developers found and were using to develop software on the ilad in successive firmware releases. Has an exploit for the iliad ever surfaced? Was it likely to? Why then this fixation on fixing these unimportant loopholes when much more serious problems exist on the iliad? No timely release of the gpl required source code, closing the rest of the code (who will steal this code? Who is iRex protecting itself from). iRex is slowly learing from their mistakes - things seem to be much better now then they were at the beginning.

Please, iRex, realize: the open-source developer community are your friends! Do your best to cooperate with them. Give them all the tools they need to help you make the iliad better.

That's sad. Scotty leaving is pretty much the the worst possible news for us, though not unexpected.

Irex is pretty good at scaring away OS developers & geeks. "Offering a development Iliad" was obviously not enough. Scotty's role was (at least for me) to be the head of OS dev for the device. If iRex treated Scotty well, that would have attracted other developers. That's how it works with that community.

I always have the impression that there are two communities in this forum: One is people who just want to read books. This is the group who replies "i love the device, it does all i want" in all the iRex-bashing threads. (And obviously many people here have never seen, and can't imagine, what happens after you open the device completely and attract a substantial chunk of the OS community.)

And there's the OS-affine geek community, who are complaining all the time in this forum. This second community is large, much larger than the first. iRex would have needed to make the Iliad the ideal toy for that group, and they failed. The members of this community are not easy to deal with, that's for sure. But you can benefit from it, because they are committed and love to contribute.

It would have been iRex' job to please Scotty under all circumstances, because his treatment was watched by all the other geeks that may jump onto the train when it looks like fun. They should have sent scotty a bunch of Iliads, for free, no strings attached, and give him all information thats possible. They should have sent his wife flowers after scotty spent weekends in programming stuff for free that benefits iRex in the long run.

There are many potential developers out there. I am doing developments under linux, and I have a lot of contacts to research groups where people are programming embedded devices running linux. Where people do programming as a master's thesis, or research project.

These guys know I have an Iliad, that looks like the perfect toy to do cool things with, and they come to me and ask if they should get into it or not. And the story I can tell is this: When I did my first steps to play with the device, I bricked it, and there was no reinstall routine. It took me weeks to get it reinstalled, and there's still no way to do safe development. They had one dedicated programmer who could be seed of a dev community, and they scared him away."

iRex should learn from 2 cases of devices that were not originally meant to have a custom software installed.

A. The Linksys WRT54G
B. The Microsoft Xbox

Linksys had to pulish the sources, IIRC correct this was achieved through gpl-violations.org, but it hadn't harmed the device. Instead they get firmware with more and more functions developed for free.

Microsoft on the other hand tried to not let anyone else use the Xbox for anything else than it's original purpose, running games that bring money to them the one or or other way. But while trying to keep people outside, they made a good bunch of mistakes. Possibly if they had opened up to the people that were curious to run Linux on it, they would have not had that many attackers against the security system. In the end, if they had allowed Linux to run on it, maybe the security system would have not been circumvented or not in such a short time.
Source and more details on this:
http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/17_Mistakes_Microsoft_Made_in_the_Xbox_Security_Sy stem

I believe iRex fears that if they would open up the iLiad to allow a user customized OS on it, the users could circumvent the upcoming DRM system.

But in the end, the movement to circumvent the restrictions is driven by the people that want to run their customized software on it.

just my 2 cents on it. (as a user, I'm no developer)

Just in the interest of balance, we might consider a couple of alternatives. E.g. Scotty may have wanted to be paid for his RTF viewer (which can be done with open source), and iRex may not have wanted to pay or may have objected to Scotty selling it elsewhere. iRex may have wanted some kind of NDA or agreement not to develop for other systems (e.g. the Sony Reader), etc. before offering a development unit or providing additional source to Scotty. (I can't imagine what held up the payment for shipping, which should have been taken care of with no strings attached and no response required by Scotty, as iRex has all the info needed to take care of that one.)

iRex has been focusing on the b2b market -- they may be very sensitive to potential exploits in a way that readers and hobbyists are not. (It would not be good to have one's flight manuals altered without knowing it, e.g.) There may also have been some personality conflicts, which can happen with intelligent, dedicated people even if they all have the same goals in mind.

Scotty, Karel, and Matthijs have opted not to air their dirty laundry in public. That's probably for the best. I'm very sorry that Scotty isn't continuing development for the iLiad, because I'm about to purchase one and I'm one of those people who likes to get more out of a system than its original designers may have intended. But there are, in fact, other interested developers, and there could be more if iRex wants to encourage an active developer community. Perhaps we can pull the positive out of this situation by making this the turning point, when iRex will be able to release a re-flash function, a proper SDK, the GPL sources, and offer some kind of defined community developer program. I belive it is strongly in iRex's interests to do so.

Personally, I don't think the iLiad is going to take off as an eBook reader. It's too expensive, boots too slowly, and the battery doesn't last long enough. It has a lot of great features for academic and other users, though, that need more software development (e.g. indexing/searchability of annotations, academic tools, etc.). If iRex decides to encourage the developer community to explore the possibilities, they can be working on a hardware revision that could really meet the needs of this large, untapped market. But for the academic community, in particular, the development environment has to be open and inviting.

It would have been iRex' job to please Scotty under all circumstances, because his treatment was watched by all the other geeks that may jump onto the train when it looks like fun. They should have sent scotty a bunch of Iliads, for free, no strings attached, and give him all information thats possible. They should have sent his wife flowers after scotty spent weekends in programming stuff for free that benefits iRex in the long run.

Well, I couldn't disagree more. What Scotty does with his free time is his business, but one shouldn't expect anything in return for doing what is essentially voluntary work. Supporting a community takes time and time is money and I'm not convinced that supporting an OSS community is in iRex's best business interest. Yes, that may satisfy the early adopter geeks, but that's not the market they're after.

{snip}
I always have the impression that there are two communities in this forum: One is people who just want to read books. This is the group who replies "i love the device, it does all i want" in all the iRex-bashing threads. {snip}

And there's the OS-affine geek community, who are complaining all the time in this forum. This second community is large, much larger than the first. iRex would have needed to make the Iliad the ideal toy for that group, and they failed. {and yet another snip}

If I buy a car I want it to drive me from A to B in relative comfort without depleting my countries oil reserve.
(It should also have one of those little cardboard trees hanging from the mirror with pine scent)
I couldn't care less if the engine is a high-tech piece of equipment, a little dwarf paddling his legs out or a magical ring with elvish inscription.
Yep, I am part of that first group!

I can imagine that the car manufacturer wants to sell his cars to stupid people like me.
He loves me.
Simply because there are more of me than there are of the smart type that immediately starts to fiddle with all kinds of tools to improve performance with the risk of driving very fast with one wheel coming unstuck.

The Iliad is and never was intended solely for the purpose of satisfying the tweek, fiddle and upgrade itches that the techie types constantly seem to suffer from.
It was meant for the simple dolts like me who are impressed with their own abillity to form letters into -sometimes intelligu intelligla..intelligalbl- into words. :scholar:
It may be true that the geek section of this forum is much larger that the dolt section, but I very much doubt this to be true for all the buyers from Irex.

The Iliad has always been advertised as an ebook reader, not a gamesconsole, pda or coffee making machine.
Now, I have seen some of the work the geeks have done for the dolts on the Iliad.
It was mostly about as user friendly as a head-on collision with a Sherman tank :sweatdrop for little ol'e simpletons like me.

I don't think Irex should have taken extra care to make the Iliad an ongoing project for the the geeks.
It should also not have taken four tries to get a good working Iliad to Scotty but sometimes shit just happens and especially so with new hightech stuff like this.

The procedure for returning a dud is not an easy one.
But then again I didn't find it more difficult when my Iliad started to talk back to me and finally stopped working then what I have encountered with other products .
No-one likes a DOA unit, definitely not three. :furious3:
I am sure however that Irex's return policy is as good as any other.

Scotty, I am very sorry you had a bad experience with the Iliad.
And you certainly were the king of the geeks :crowngrin as far as I am concerned.
I guess you'll be back someday because no geek can stay away from the real challenges. :thumbsup:

@Karel.

I have a question. Electronics are quite far from my fields of expertise so here it is. Why in designing the Iliad, did you have to build a completely new computing device? would it have been possible to use an existing PDA and adapt it to eink? It could have kept the price way down!

... The Iliad is and never was intended solely for the purpose of satisfying the tweek, fiddle and upgrade itches that the techie types constantly seem to suffer from.
It was meant for the simple dolts like me who are impressed with their own abillity to form letters into -sometimes intelligu intelligla..intelligalbl- into words. :scholar:
It may be true that the geek section of this forum is much larger that the dolt section, but I very much doubt this to be true for all the buyers from Irex.

The Iliad has always been advertised as an ebook reader, not a gamesconsole, pda or coffee making machine.
Now, I have seen some of the work the geeks have done for the dolts on the Iliad.
It was mostly about as user friendly as a head-on collision with a Sherman tank :sweatdrop for little ol'e simpletons like me.

I don't think Irex should have taken extra care to make the Iliad an ongoing project for the the geeks.
It should also not have taken four tries to get a good working Iliad to Scotty but sometimes shit just happens and especially so with new hightech stuff like this. ...
Well, the license for a lot of the inner works of the iLiad is GPL and therefore they have to make it a "ongoing project for geeks" i.e. publish the sources and, depending on the point of view, also a tool to reflash. However, the second one can be argued about, as this depends on the interpretion of the GPL.
If there was a way to reflash the iLiad at home, development would probably be easier, you wouldn't have to fear bricking it and paying 75 EUR for a reflash.

I would not categorize the people that use/own the iLiad to two basic groups.

Being on the periphery of this debacle as I am not a hacker I can tell you some things that I have noted.

The way I see it there are people that are totally satisfied with the device and are the "it does what I want and it's really great". There are the hackers that have the wherewithal and ability to get it to do what they want, There are the frustrated hackers that do not receive what they construe as enough support for their pursuits. And there are those that are totally dissatisfied.

To me I think that there is a specific "blindness" in all of these. I see the totally satisfied as justifying their purchase of a device that is no way close to meeting iRex's initial design goals/schedule. The hackers that get it to function in the manner that they want live in a world of CLI and directory structure that is bewildering and puzzling to those that are not familiar with it. There is an edge of conceit above those that do not have those skills. Then there are the hackers like scotty that wanted the device to be opened to them entirely, so that they could define the device over and beyond what the initial concept that iRex had for it. I had the sense of frustration with them because they were hobbled in doing what they wanted to with the device.

My opinion being a person that is relatively technically proficient but not a developer/hacker is that in the current state the iLiad does not even come close to the competition. This is not because it does not have the potential to have advanced features, it's because it's basic underpinnings are flawed. The absurdly long boot time and questionable battery life are some of the primary problems. I find for such a short period of time and a small amount of sales an inordinate amount of reports of device failures including what appears to be a very fragile screen. I have visited the eFlybook site and have noted the same discontent that can be seen here, and that was sold as a fully functional device!

The hackers that are able to get the device to do what they want are talented, but unless they set things up so that the people that don't have their skills can use it, it make no point to the rest of us. yokos is a fundamental player in making the work that scotty did on the device available to a wider range of people. His ( I am assuming gender here) specific point to point instructions made it so that the relatively technically unsophisticated person could try the new development processes.

scotty and others worked in a world that was mostly inaccessible to the laity. I think that he pushed forward and gave insight to the iRex team in that he offered a fresh perspective. To me, iRex gives me the impression that they see the iLiad as their child and they are not very willing to let anyone tell them what they can/cannot or should do with the device. I got a sense that there are definite cultural differences in the inter dynamics between scotty and iRex. To me there seemed to be an old world/new world rift.

I try to maintain an objectivity with the device, but as time goes by I get more and more frustrated with it. I purchased it specifically as a device that would hold documents that I could access without starting up a laptop. The idea was that I could use it on my job. I knew some of the limitations of the device. I also saw that there was a SDK being made available and it was my impression that there were some people that would get the functionality of the device that iRex was not willing to do. This would be most specifically be being able to access the internet. Not having that available on a device that has wireless built into it is patently absurd and shows conceit that iRex feels that you should only connect to the iDS through their device. Overall that was not the biggest point of purchase for me and is just an example of how I feel that the device is hobbled to a certain extent.

The bigger points to me is that I currently have a device that has limited functionality. With the slow boot time, limited battery life, no bookmark support in PDF's, usage for the intended purpose for which it was purchased is cumbersome at best. Mostly it sits in my flight bag ( in a rather robust protective cover) and I dread having to pull it out and suffer through the start up and navigation times. I get concerned as when it will possibly drop dead since I see so many reports of problems on this and the iRex site. When I purchased it I knew that it was still under development, the initial release information was that it would be ready for prime time in September of 2006. We are coming up on nearly half a year after that date and we have only received incremental improvements. I will have to state that in some cases some of the improvements are impressive and are certainly welcome. The thing is that upgrades are coming at a snail's pace and unless there is a revolutionary update in the wings I fear that the device will just be passed by further developments and improvements in hardware by other companies.

The iLiad represents different things to different people. In the basic function of being a reading device for other than reference material or more specifically recreational reading I am sure it is more than adequate. For functionality over and beyond that the device is not up to speed. It was this promised advanced functionality that swayed people more to the iLiad than the Sony Reader. Right now I see only one benefit of the iLiad over the Sony; that is the bigger screen. Until the iLiad is "finished" it is clearly not a player in the ebook device world.

I would really be interested in knowing how many iLiads have been sold in the B2B environment, what they are being used as, and just how satisfied these customers are.

In conclusion I am trying to maintain an optimism about the iLiad, after all I paid a pile of money for it and I would really like to see some real return on my investment.

I am not intending this post to offend anyone, it is just my observations.

Good Luck To Us All!

TBH... I think everyone's probably taking this all a bit too seriously...! :cool: If it was an Irex dev I'd be concerned...

I have been involved in product development on and off for a number of years and I am always amazed by the users that come back and know more about how a certain part of it works then the people that put it together do. This is not a bad thing. We look at it from our angle and they see it in another light. We have learned a great deal from them from new features we didn't know we had laid the groundwork for to new uses that we had never dreamed about before.

Sure Scott is not their main market for the future, just one of the best examples of the current market of early adopters and gurus. Sure there are flaws (not to say "bugs") in the code and a lot of things can (and will) be made better as time goes on. What Scott did was to push the envelope perhaps in ways the iRex team never saw or was constrained by budget, time, and management to avoid.

Any tech product on the market without a vibrant user community is doomed to die. There are too many choices and too many others out there that can (and will) meet the demands of your target market and will listen to the "geeks" and their "rantings."

I picked the Sony Reader over the iRex. I am glad Scott is going to develop stuff for the Sony. It may never meet my needs or do things that I want the Sony to do. This is not the point. The point is that he is pushing at the envelope of features and functions and something good always comes out of it. If not today, then tomorrow or the next day.

What Scott did was to push the envelope perhaps in ways the iRex team never saw or was constrained by budget, time, and management to avoid.

Did he...? Al I saw where some tweaks to the PDF reader, and ports of calculators. Not exacty ground-breaking stuff... The rest (the bluetooth projec, a port of an email client, and rtf support) all seem vaporware...

I'll be interested in what he produces for the Sony, but I wouldn't be calling him a guru... Just another hacker with some interesting ideas.

Did he...? Al I saw where some tweaks to the PDF reader, and ports of calculators. Not exacty ground-breaking stuff... The rest (the bluetooth projec, a port of an email client, and rtf support) all seem vaporware...

He did. While I agree that he's a little bit strong on the talking side, he actually produced a lot. Setting up and explaining a build environment, digging into the undocumented sources, and uncovering the Iliad's software details is a lot of work and the foundation for any porting/programming project. It produces nothing that's visible to the user, but is a substantial chunk of the work that's required to get new software for the Iliad.

Reg. the car metaphor: The people who want everything open do that because it was announced so, though implicitly. If you buy a desktop computer from, say, Dell, with Windows on it, you can expect to get original, licensed, legal software. That is, you can expect that Dell paid their dues to Microsoft to be in the legal position to install Windows on the PC you buy there. And I expected to get a legal operating system plus SDK, and I didn't. The Iliad software can only be distributed legally if you publish your sources.

Reg. "understanding" not showing your sources: If the business model begins with "we steal some software" - then I don't care about the rest. No understanding, no sympathy. If you want to sell a closed system, you are free to do so - just buy software that allows it.

Reg. "basing the Iliad on some PDA": They did. Hardware design is close to Zaurus/Ipaq/.... The software and operating system is essentially OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus stuff. (You didn't think iRex made their software themselves, did you?)

On the other hand, I heard (actually in the beginning of december) that the FSF Europe made some moves towards iRex, and that there will be some GPL/MPL-compliant release in February. Perhaps things get better then, though it means that iRex first scares away the developers, then releases sources afterwards. Sounds like perfect iRex logic. And I'm sure they will promote that release as a big, friendly, oh-we-are-so-nice-let's-group-hug step just out of pure kindness.

I'd like to stress (again) that it is not a matter of "not wanting" or "deliberately not releasing".

Also: there is no obligation under the GPL to release a SDK. Even so, we have already released the complete SDK/toolchain. I would have thought opening up the PDF viewer and the SDK would have sparked a lot more constructive development. Its sad to see that especially those shouting loudest for the sources, have not shown any interest in actually using those available.

You didn't think iRex made their software themselves, did you?)
For the core OS, we use standard available building-blocks, which we mostly haven't modified at all (apart from applying publicly available patches). On top of that a lot of custom applications -- written from scratch -- are running. We're talking >100k lines of C code (without headers).

You can expect the sources for the kernel and the sources of modified GPL/LGPL software packages by the end of February (as also advertised on our developers website).

matthijs,

if you had a public to do list we would see the things that are not going to be done and perhaps look at addressing some of these. I would like an RTF viewer for instance, but i would not consider porting one until i was sure there wouldnt be one in the next firmware. Does that make sense ?

Hey, Matthijs, dude, no need to defend here.

Its sad to see that especially those shouting loudest for the sources, have not shown any interest in actually using those available.
Huh. I hope you don't mean me here. After the burning-my-fingers episode where I bricked my device, I shut up, due to a sudden decrease in interest in the Iliad.

For the core OS, we use standard available building-blocks, which we mostly haven't modified at all (apart from applying publicly available patches). On top of that a lot of custom applications -- written from scratch -- are running. We're talking >100k lines of C code (without headers).
Well I don't think 100klines is so much. Lines-of-code is actually a very bad measure for development effort. But, to be fair, let me add a few numbers to yours, because there's many non-programmers here. The software implementation for my masters thesis (where the implementation was not the main part), was over 50 klines, in C++, including headers. That means one developer, working part-time in parallel to his studies. According to some random site i just googled (http://msquaredtechnologies.com/m2rsm/rsm_software_project_metrics.htm), the linux kernel (version 2.6.17), is over 4 million lines, and firefox is over 2 million. Note iRex uses an older kernel (2.4.something) and minimo instead of firefox.

I think Matthijs' point is "hey, we did a lot of software development". And my point is "hey, but that's still just a tiny piece of the Iliad's software". I think both are right :)


You can expect the sources for the kernel and the sources of modified GPL/LGPL software packages by the end of February (as also advertised on our developers website).
Well I think that's half a year too late. Add a safe development environment and user-friendly software installer for the Iliad, and you may attract new developers. Which would be the best that could happen to you and the Iliad's users, so I wish you the best luck for it.

(But don't expect to convince me. From what I've seen so far, I don't trust you guys at all. Let me see some proofs instead of announcements.)

@Matthijs

I really liked you guys at iRex, I got on very well with Karel and Angel and the little contact I had with you was also rather pleasant.

However, I have to agree with ali...

I'm not a programmer myself, but I have been following the whole SDK/Sources thing from the beginning...and the release dates were postponed again and again. Might be that you will actually make it this time, but it won't repair the damage that is already done.

As for developers jumping ont he released sources...well...they did in a way, but since it does not really make a lot of sense to develop a PDF viewer that is going to be useless once the next Frimware release is out, I can understand why there was not really that much interest.
What developers need (as far as I can tell, not being one) is the complete system, a way to test apps and a way to safely restore the system if something goes wrong.
Developing a PDF viewer is your job, developing additional software could be the community job, but working blind and using security holes and grudgingly granted "hack access" is not everybody's glass of beer.

There is no reason why you shoul offer a SDK, nobody can force you, but if you want the device to be open (as advertised) and want people to develop for it (as advertised) you'll have to put the cards on the table. If you had done it right from the start, maybe that would have sped development of the Iliad along, if you do it now, perhaps it'll still work, but much trust has been lost and many users and developers have been dissappointed, so i'm not sure how it will work out now.

@markiehill:
That does make sense. I cannot go into details of what is going to be in next versions, but what I can do is share some information on projects that we consider interesting for 3rd party developers.

Nice examples of things we will not likely develop soon ourselves are: full web-browser, games, email application, calendar functionality, calculator, etc.

As for document viewers: you're welcome to start developing an additional format (like RTF), but to facilitate viewer development we're currently working on a viewer framework. This would abstract creating a document viewer somewhat and make all viewers behave in a similar way. Each document format would have a plugin to the framework and the effort for enabling a document format would be reduced to porting an existing library and writing glue to hook it into the viewer framework API.

Given this, I'd say that porting an existing document viewer (like f.i. FBreader) would be a lot more useful than trying to write an RTF viewer from scratch (or starting from iPDF).

Its sad to see that especially those shouting loudest for the sources, have not shown any interest in actually using those available.


Two points in answer to this:


1. The existing docs/sdk are fine if you want to do trivial stuff like porting simple X Window apps (which I did). If you want to make the Iliad do anything useful (like last-page-autoload), or interesting (like suspend/resume), there is very little to help you.


2. I bricked my Iliad. Well - it died with a whimper after the upgrade to 2.8, and I couldn't prove it one way or the other. Fortunately IRex gave me the benefit of the doubt (thanks guys!) and didn't charge me to fix it - but I have sadly decided that this just isn't a developer-friendly machine and left it for other more hardy souls to work with. Maybe if they provide a robust unbricking solution I'll be interested enough to give it another go - but I'm beginning to doubt it.


I wish them all the best with their B2B ventures, and hope they sell lots of machines.

Nice examples of things we will not likely develop soon ourselves are: [...] MP3 player.

:laugh3:



p.s.: As a friendly hint, and to prove my sympathy and deep love to your company and its business attitudes: You forgot to inexist the mp3 player in the official product specifications (http://www.irextechnologies.com/files/Productspecs-iLiad.pdf).

A very good point Ali...

Mind explaining this oh official iRex people?

After all that _is_ what we _PAID_ for.

Regarding the MP3-player: my bad. That one should not be in the list (i'll remove it). I was thinking of the MP3 player that was already under development here, but forgot that it's also on our internal list.

I'll stop with this for today, before I start talking complete nonsense... :rolleyes5

Edtorial thought...

Okay, here's a great chance to show the maturity and grace of MobileRead folks! Matthijs has clarified, so let's not take advantage and take out any pent up frustrations on him by jumping on an honest mistake, but let's stick to real items. In the midst of any disagreements, we should appreciate his openness and input, which is a benefit to all. Last thing we want is to make him have to be so careful about his phrasing of things that he's afraid to share his thoughts!

Thanks!

Here, here!

Couldn't agree more, Bob. :yes:

Well said, Bob!

Thanks Bob!

happy birthday, scotty!

To Matthijs and Karel:
I don't think that it is enough to add shell feature, because after that warranty is removed. I try to get shell access, and my iLiad died. I cannot say that is because i have no experence enough. I am working as system administrator and developer for linux for 7 years! I paid for reflashing. It is not too much, but it is enough to stop to develop for iLiad. While there is no way to reflash at home, or, at least, to reset to fabric condition, nobody will develop for iLiad.

By the way, there is so much things which can do iLiad more useful and frendly (and so - more popular), but you don't want to provide more support for developers..

I would like an RTF viewer for instance,

unrtf works fine for me. It converts to HTML which can be readily converted to Iliad PDF.

Regards,
rwst