We have some very exciting news to share with you today. First of all, we have been communicating your feedback to Microsoft and they have been very responsive. We can’t share all the details yet but we can tell you that you will be very happy with what Microsoft will announce very soon.
As for NETMF on GHI Electronics’ side, we have decided to focus on the GHI extension libraries and firmware quality. With this, we are including the Cerb-family of products in our extensions (formerly premium libraries). The new firmware for the Cerb-family will include all features found on all other devices, within the memory limitations. This firmware will run on all Cerb devices, old and new. The firmware binary will also run on any compatible non-GHI hardware. The only exception is that the firmware is only licensed for commercial use when used with GHI Electronics’ hardware. That is not all, thanks to Oberon Microsystems, the NETMF porting kit includes STM32, allowing anyone to port to the STM32 micro (Cerb-family).
To support open source and the openness of NETMF and Gadgeteer, we are keeping FEZ Hydra in production and it will remain open source. Its price will be dropped to only $24.95! With this being at near zero profit, we hope to see more companies and more makers joining us in developing the powerful NETMF/Gadgeteer technology. One of the supported compilers for FEZ Hydra is the free and open source GCC compiler. FEZ Hydra is the best place today to learn porting NETMF and Gadgeteer and it is completely open, hardware and software.
The next beta SDK that includes The Cerb-family is only few days away so stay tuned.
Cerb family will be closed source, with GHI premium extensions like USB host, Signal generator etc. (as RAM/Flash allows). However the binaries will be free to download for non-commercial use ?
@ Rajesh - Hyrda will be the open source product we are offering at near cost. The Cerb firmware will be licensed for non-commerical use on non-GHI hardware and for commercial use if using GHI hardware.
It is did change with last announcement. It is now premium and at a lower cost!
Note that we no longer use the word premium but I used it now for clarity. All GHI products are now the same, sharing the same libraries, just how it was couple years ago. The exception is hydra which still uses the same libraries but with limited support… and it is all open source OSHW. Hydra is provided at cost as a gift to the open source community.
Sometimes getting folks to embrace the obvious is a hell of a fight, which really makes you wonder why sometimes. The future is waiting for Gadgeteer to make it happen.
So do I take it that with the Cerb family firmware going closed source that means OSHW boards that use the cerb firmware like threadneedle and Ingenuity micros Octopus will have to be withdrawn?
