14 Mar
2023
14 Mar
'23
9:16 p.m.
But, as some who worked
to bring a product to market only to see people on forums say "Skip
buying it from Jim for $$$$, you can build the same thing by yourself
for $ from AliExpress parts or buy this eBay knockoff for 2X$", I will
admit that is somewhat infuriating. If the hobby community is not
willing to pay a bit of premium to support those who bring out the
products that benefit the community, the designers will get disgusted
and leave.
Agree 100%. We stopped running XT-IDEs for a while due to the proliferation of knockoffs
and the total indifference of a good portion of the community -- some folks even get
hostile when you suggest they maybe not buy knockoffs that can't even abide by the
terms of the open-source project license!
I'd designed a universal "bolts to any existing XT-IDE and doesn't eat a
slot" CF adapter that never got run. After posting a development picture of the
prototype, one of the knockoff folks ripped the design off before I had even received my
quote from Keystone for the custom ISA brackets. No way was I going to spend on a run of
500x custom brackets when someone was already ripping off the idea. There are other things
that we've chosen not to run for the same basic reason, and others that won't get
open sourced.
Thus, I'd say if a Saleae is something to pursue,
try to buy
one from them, to support their awesome GUI, and then drop by eBay and
grab 2 or 4 of the knockoffs to put in your toolbox or travel debugging
rucksack.
I'll go further and say don't buy knockoffs, period.
It's nice to support the designers in some capacity, but buying knockoffs fuels the
ecosystem that creates knockoffs. With our stuff, it's never been that a single
knockoff operation eats our lunch, it's that there's a zillion of them that run
maybe 100 boards and disappear. Death by a thousand cuts. They charge $1-5 less while
running the cheapest possible boards, stuffing with salvaged chips, etc. Meanwhile,
we're having to pay for runs of boards with hard gold plating and buy genuine parts
from Mouser.
Thanks,
Jonathan