Creature XL said:
Why is everybody talking of "Taking risks"?
If Pandora would have failed, or will fail(!) OPT makes even more debts and pay us our money back.
So, I can't see the risk.
In theory, so we are told, they would take a huge hit and pay us our money back. They have also said many other things (Two Months) which have proven to be... on the optimisitc side, rather than correct. There is risk involved in trusting that they would live up to their word, especially when they repeatedly (for whatever reason) were not living up to their word. Circumstances beyond their control? Sure - so what is preventing the possibility that there would be "circumstances beyond their control" which would prevent them paying us all back? Like having undervalued the amount of insurance? Having been late on a single insurance payment? Having not had the fine print of the insurance studied closely enough? And so on.
When you give money over to someone on The Internet on the basis of a promise, it is a risk. How much of a risk? That's really for each person to evaluate for themselves.
As for the "purity" of Pandora - Craig is a businessman. He'd love to make a ton of money off Pandora and go on to make successive replacements every 18 months, I think it was. ED seems a bit more "Open Source" oriented, but he'd be quite willing to make a ton of money too. MWeston has his own company name - not OpenPandora - emblazoned onto each motherboard, so seems definately to have made a commercial-style claim to the heart of the machine. DaveC, like ED, could well be in it MORE for "doing a good job" than for making money, but who turns money away?
There are community members who have put effort into making Pandora a success. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and have varying degrees of impact. At the "top" (from my perspective) we have people like notaz who throw their time and effort in for free in working on the firmware and OS. Vital. Purity of spirit right there, I guess.
Then we have people like torpor, writing and/or porting programs/applications/games. If Pickle doesn't have any financial reward he'd make a superb example of this category of community member too. Probably just as vital as OS/firmware developers, because without ported and homebrew software, this would be a very niche product with only geek appeal.
You can drill right down to the people who, with no financial incentive or programming skills, contributed wallpaper towards the graphical side of the Pandora "package" to make it all that it could be. Out of the goodness of their hearts, to make the Pandora as appealing as possible.
Those are all contributions of good spirit, all open and just and nice and lovely - and without any of them the Pandora would be a poorer experience. Yet, with only them, there would be no Pandora. Because one of the major things OpenPandora (the company) needed to get the Pandora to market was money. Lots of it. There have been times where they have looked very risky. Very risky indeed. When ED has been running around like a headless chicken trying to find his own head on a floor littered with them, because of the worry of customers cancelling due to yet another failure to deliver the Pandora, yet another delay, yet another broken "not a promise, we never said it was a promise". While OpenPandora Team members have put their own money into the pot (at the cost of some house remortgaging, I understand), that was nowhere near enough to make Pandora come true. Customers have provided that money, and they provided it basicaly on faith.
Anyone who bought more than one did so at their own risk. They almost certainly (almost because they could be rich and buying for friends and relatives) hoped to be able to sell one or more units from the get-go - but they were also doing something that OpenPandora desperately needed, and fronted up cash. At least one member - more I believe - placed more orders later on when OpenPandora was struggling financially. Think about that. It's possible that without people who placed multiple orders to try and ensure the project went through, that the Pandora project could be something that just fell on its face. Hero? No - but certainly not scum. Possibly one of a very few "saviours" of the project? Maybe. Certainly very, VERY strong supporters of the project, and NOT entirely profit-driven.
As/if OpenPandora get their act together and Pandoras start rolling off the assembly line reliably, the current situation of "low availability" will ease slightly. While early eBayed Pandoras go for near $2000, later ones will go for less. It's possibly that by the time Jumpman (was it Jumpman we're all up in arms about this week?) sells his last units, they could be going for a considerable loss, selling under retail value. I hope not, but it's a possibility. These early-order "profits" don't actually return him to profit yet, necessarily, because OpenPandora still have a chunk of his money - hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars of it. Which they've used to help make the project a reality.
Few sensible, intelligent people do things for one reason and one reason alone. If Jumpman had bought all those Pandoras purely and simply out of the desire to help OpenPandora, IMHO he'd have been an idiot. Of course he should want to sell them, and of course if at all possible there should be some profit involved - as much as possible, in fact! But if profit were all the motivation he had, OpenPandora have been a very unwise looking investment opportunity from the start, and have been looking worse every month.
Jumpman. Not a hero, and not a douche. He's just this guy...
Well said!
