Re: [En-Nut-Discussion] Hi, I´m new to Ethernut and new to the list.

[Harald Kipp]

Dan,

many thanks for your kind words. I'd like to pass them to
a list of people, who had been most helpful in the past.
But I'm too scared to miss someone. :-)

Most of all I'm pleased, that the concept of Open Source
seems to work for us. Several companies are using Nut/OS,
making money without paying royalties. But many of them
invest man power into enhancements and give them back to
the community. Some of them integrate the original
Ethernut in their products, increasing egnite's revenue.
Beside too much work and too low salaries (moan, moan ;-)),
our company is healthy and got some cash to put into new
developments.

However, our focus is still on hobbyists and educational
institutes for two good reasons. They experience much less
commercial pressure and thus are open for risky experiments
or coming up with weird looking ideas like Contiki. They
are simply more fun. Second reason is, that some of them
transfer their knowledge about Nut/OS and Ethernut to their
jobs later. This makes it very important to us to help
those "bloody beginners" as far as possible. As we all
know, as a newbie you're struggling with problems that
make you laugh a few weeks later. I'm afraid that too
many Ethernuts vanished in drawers after its users became
completely frustrated by most simple problems. Personally
I have a large kit collection, some of them were never
powered up because they contain not much more than a board
and data sheets of the chips. Others are great, like
Rabbit, which was _my_ first Ethernet Starter Kit.
(Finally the great work of the people providing avr-gcc
and avr-libc confinced me, that Atmel's AVR is the
better choice.)

We were told often, that people had been looking for
a long time until they found Ethernut. The project is up
since 2000 and the market for tiny embedded Ethernet
controllers increased dramatically, while egnite is on
a slow track. Frankly, we were quite happy with this.
It already happened too often, that we were out of stock
or even forgot (!) to process orders. This is constantly
changing for the better and we are considering magazine
ads now. This will probably attract more people, who start
working with microcontrollers for the first time.

End of my blether, back to development. :-)

Harald