Don't listen to some EE expert tell you the product can't be developed for less than a million. These guys are used to working at big shops that routinely throw that kind of money into the garbage. This product could have shipped, if only they had run the numbers first.
With a cheaper chip, better project management and using a shop like Proto Labs for tooling they could have made it happen. Resourcefulness, not resources. $99 is pretty aggressive, but it could be done with a slim margin.
Resourcefulness, agreed! I have made consumer products for less, with resourcefulness, careful planning and sweat. Key is to do a bunch of the work yourself. If you don't have those skills and can't learn them, get cofounders who do. Or use the skills you do have as constraints when developing new product ideas. Don't try to do too many new things at once — you're compounding risk.
If the application or source code is distributed then sometimes removing the license would be a violation. But most open source licenses allow you to make private forks that you keep private. If that is your desire then changing out the license disclaimer to say "Some or all of this code is the property of X, do not distribute under any circumstance" actually makes a lot of sense. If the original license was left in place it would be easy to think that the files in the private fork where publicly distributed. Obviously they don't have permission to change the actual license on the originally public content.
It seems like a very bad idea to remove a copyright notice from a file. Suppose the next developer to see the file doesn't know its origin, then incorporates it into a product that is distributed.
Joyent, you so cray. Thanks for reminding us that "Never" and "Lifetime", "100% Uptime Guarantee" and "Fanatical Service" are all bullshit indicators. You've got a good cloud, you don't need to make promises that you can't keep.
I think you should touch on frequency of updates: how often does Apple release, how often does Google?
Also it's not really fair to expect that every phone is going to run the very latest Android code, especially ice cream sandwich, which expects a forward facing camera, doesn't use the navigation buttons and so forth.
I do agree with the general premise that Android carriers/manufactures tend to release and abandon. They have no interest in updating the OS after the sale, which explains the popularity of Cyanogen.
Son: Death.
Father: Death, well I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction.
Son: I want more life, fucker.