Monk said:
Without myself getting into calling people fools or ignoramuses, I must admit that on the whole a web site like http://www.open-pandora.org/ looks pretty much like an invitation to Joe Public to buy Pandoras. Quotes like "It might be October, it might be December." sound like the product should be forthcoming very soon (well, they would have last September).
I'm not sure that customers don't have a reasonable right to have their expectations in such regards be met, or the right to be unhappy (and express that) when such expectations aren't met. I'm not sure that investors in any company tend to sit back silently either - from what I know of investors (including Craig's comments on the topic) they are generally very demanding too.
None of which excuses anyone for being a jackass, of course.
Everything seems to be painted so HARSHLY too often, when in actuality we all share more in common than the fairly small differences that divide us.
Regardless what advocates of political correctness would suggest, sometimes the best word for stupid is stupid. How one relates to that is a personal thing. I've done many stupid things in my life that I'm not proud of, but the most important thing is that I was able to retrospectively understand why they were stupid, hence I didn't need to make stupid my identity. It's probable that many people who jumped in as fools later became more involved and understanding of the details and so of the project.
It's true that investors also have the right to demand results, but shouldn't that be proportional to the made investment? A price of a single Pandora in this project is rather small and simplistically enough to buy you a voice worth a single unit. The difference to a normal situation is that this is a community project. Even that is not completely true, as that ~350€ isn't enough to produce a single unit as for that you need mass production which is dependent on thousands of additional small investments similar to yours. If I understood right, even EvilDragon himself was spotted from the forums and became part of the core team. The same laws of accountability just don't hold under these special circumstances. It is a fact that these people didn't know all that well what they were getting into themselves, and such projects require the effort of a large, mostly very unorganized group of people.
The customers' role in this is different to the usual setting as we funded this project, and that requires a certain degree of commitment. What if everyone starts pulling out their money halfway the process and the OP team is left alone with massive pre-paid orders and components with the money already scattered around the world and transformed into half-complete parts. We're not left with, say, 10% of 4000 completed units, but instead 4000 of 10% completed units, and an enormous debt to be paid by the core team who was working the hardest on making this happen while the rest of us sat on our asses wondering why our cash still hasn't turned into a device. The longer you've had your money invested in such a project, the more difficult it becomes to pull it out because (aside from maybe the PayPal issue and the nub factory going bankrupt) the closer the project has come to completion. I would say the system itself is excellent, just the fact that investors couldn't be hand-picked and the deal between them wasn't more carefully negotiated brought problems in form of community dissonance. Of course we can express our dissatisfaction, I'm not trying to take that away from people, but at the same time we must understand how the system works.
I admit it IS a difficult system to deal in as a customer, but what we can do to ease that pain (the wait, frustration) is, basically; Either take a refund and let someone who is more willing to make that long-term commitment to take over, offer advice and counseling, or offer concrete help - i.e. contribute to the project. We've seen all of this happen, sometimes it surprises me just how many different kinds of expertise you can find solely by attending this forum. After the project has gained enough inertia to keep progressing, facing small obstacles along the way and without a catastrophic show-stopper ending the game, it's the best
we finish the thing we started. Even if you would take a refund at this point, earlier you were there helping this get off the ground, for which you get good karma but unfortunately not a Pandora. The completion of the project is at this point more certain than ever before, so I wouldn't consider canceling as big a sin as, say, before setting the case order, because the investment (which is getting closer and closer to earning to be called a purchase) would be quickly replaced given the positive publicity from the finished cases. It's not something to throw a parade for either, and the personal frustration definitely doesn't justify attacking the foundations of the project (which have been somewhat fragile at times).
I was one of the fools, then again I joined in very late (late June/early July '09). It was around the time when Craig said it would be complete in about a month or two, and of course I thought that must be a reasonable guess. I educated myself a little on the history of the project to learn where it was presently, and learned a bit more about the structure of the community (specifically the most core parts of it). I would normally feel this a reckless thing to advertise, but at that point I considered my purchase a risk investment. These people want to make this happen, I want them to make it happen, we depend on each other, so if the ship sinks it would sink with their time and money and my money on it. I think that's just one instance where the "community" part of the project manifests. I do get some satisfaction from the thought that I'm funding such a great project that started with just a couple of guys talking "There should be something like this", taking input from a large community to help in defining "this", and then started building it.
No, I don't want a tap on the back, I'm in with a couple hundred euros that I was able to afford getting rid of at the time of purchase. It's peanuts compared to the total cost of mass production. I want people to also consider this difficult journey from the developers' perspective, as that often gets neglected in the heat of personal frustration accumulating after each disappointment that we always deal with from our rather narrow perspective of "You got my money, so are we there yet?".