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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.
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