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ali · 02-03-2007, 05:59 AM

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."

02-03-2007, 05:59 AM	#28
ali Addict Posts: 302 Karma: 116 Join Date: May 2006 Device: Iliad, dude!	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."