[Libre-soc-dev] 3d gpu business plan

[Lauri Kasanen]

On Mon, 28 Dec 2020 17:19:54 +0000
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:

> > Thus they'd reap the profit at that point with little work.
>
> no... they won't.  or they might - in 4 years time, by which point
> we'll already have established customers, products, reputations and
> more.
>
> the people that i am speaking with understand this extremely well.
> the lag time from when "someone-else-copies-the-idea" to "they get up
> to speed" is literally years, here, lauri.
>
> if we can't get ready and established before then, then, well, we
> don't really deserve to succeed, commercially.  we go back to being
> "Foundation-driven", and that's fine with me, too.
...
> whichever way it plays, i don't mind.

Luke, I'm not sure you understand how investors think. "Why would we
invest in this effort, when the minute the fruit is ready, someone else
can reap the rewards" - it does not make sense moneywise.

It's great that you already have investors with other motivations, but
this main question needs a good answer. ATM it does not have one.

1. The money is in selling X billion of these.
2. That happens at the point the product and its supporting drivers
are ready.
3. Due to being open, any company Y can take it at that point, and get
it to market cheaper and faster. Thus no profits for the investor who
made the design possible.

"Our reputation and customer relationships will lead to them ordering
from us, over the exact same product cheaper from someone else" - this
is wishful thinking.

"It's free advertising for us when there's X billion LibreSoc widgets
in use, even if we didn't get a cent from them" - that's a reason to
invest in the company that sold the X billion widgets, not in us.

In a traditional company, the answer would be patents. That obviously
doesn't apply for an open product. If you want to play the ethical
angle alone, that will cut out most investors.

- Lauri