Growing Ecosystem

The ecosystem surrounding one of my microprocessor designs is growing slowly, but surely. In addition to the world’s leading software defined radio project, already using my processor core, I have just been notified today, that another group intends to use my processor as the core processor for their hardware platform. If their platform takes off, it could potentially be the world’s leading router platform.

So, now I have to think about throwing additional resources into my hobby project to grow it into something more significant. All this time, it has been pretty much a project that I took up as a learning opportunity. If there was something interesting that I’d like to learn about microprocessors, I would try it out on my processor design to see how it works. I’ve always learned by doing, rather than reading.

Presently, all that I have is the processor core. I have not written any software for it nor have I built any hardware applications around it. The people who used it had to build everything around it from scratch. All I did was provide the core along with some support for it. When they faced problems, they would contact me for help. In return, if they fixed any problems, they would send patches to me.

All is well so far.

However, with more and more professional projects taking up an interest and using my core, I have to think of a long term support infrastructure and ecosystem around the core. It might actually be prudent to consider porting Linux to my core and making a basic demo platform that others can then build on. I should probably consider further developing the software capabilities to add value to the core.

But all these things take time and effort. While it’s been mainly a hobby project, I could choose to do things whenever I was free to do so. However, with more and more commercial projects sellling devices built around my core, it might be prudent for me to charge some sort of ad-hoc maintenance fee. I think that I will have a discussion with the different projects who use my cores, to work out some sort of payment schedule.

I don’t expect this thing to make me rich. I only think that it’s fair to compensate me for any time and effort in supporting their commercial projects.