[techhelpbb]

The interesting part will not be who got into round 2. It will be to see if anything we proposed makes a dent in the outcome. While we wrote that proposal we specifically made the attempt to not evangelize a particular product because of the high risk of the lock-in that goes with it (that was mentioned in our proposal directly). There was no reason one couldn't take the radio module as we proposed and connect it to the Atmel based board in this topic (in fact at the core of that radio prototype is currently an Atmel AVR chip). We weren't trying to say that the Atmel is better than the PIC, is better than the 68k is better than x86. We wanted to produce whatever we could that best fit within the context of the problem and the perspective of 'voting for best' evolves outside of FIRST as people may love Arduino this week and fawn over XCore next. We can't make everyone happy all of the time...but we can make it so you can take the blue Legos out and put the red ones in.

Our proposal said right in it we would encourage vendors to specifically do exactly what I'm giving money to do right now (I am putting my money where my mouth is). To grow specific solutions where there is market interest.

I've got really no problem letting FIRST make off with the concepts from that proposal. If they have some other vendors that they are more comfortable dealing with have a ball with it. Course doing so will require those other vendors to have interest in being open and directly accessible. So there's a better than good chance business interests will intervene because that effects the technology lock-in that allows for greater profit.

I'll be curious to see what comes from showing our cards like this.