14 Mar
2023
14 Mar
'23
2:48 p.m.
On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 09:16:02PM +0000, Jonathan Chapman via cctalk wrote:
It's not so black and white.
There are severl indications that clones of Saleae LAs being on the
market is not due to some Chinese pirate shop stealing the original IP
against the will of the creators.
* The main IC in a 16 channel Saleae LA is a Xilinx Spartan 6, which
makes it rather trivial to protect the bitstream to an extent that
makes it close to impossible to run it on contraband hardware. Saleae
chose not to make use of that.
* The Saleae host software doesn't attempt to validate that the hardware
it talks to is genuine even though that would be trivial to do as
well.
* No import stop of clones or anything like that was attempted by the
company.
* Listings on eBay, etc. of Saleae clones are advertised as "Saleae",
which could easily be stopped by the company, that has happened
thousands of times for other products.
Clones of Saleae devices are on the market since a long time. Saleae
brought out new hardware revisions since then, so the argument 'they
were taken by surprise' doesn't hold up.
I see this as a marketing stunt.
"Hobbyists can buy the cheap stuff from China, companies where things
matter will still buy from us. Word of mouth will help us."
That strategy is working pretty well actually and does so for other
companies as well.
Let's face it, there is a sizable number of people who will never ever
buy a logic analyzer for north of $1000. Either because they can't
afford it or are too greedy. That is not lost revenue for the company.
Either those people buy a clone or they don't have a Saleae product, end
of story.
Should you buy a knockoff iphone? I don't know.
Though a knockoff Saleae LA won't make you end up in hell.
-Alex
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.