Since this appears to be winding down....

In reply to:

they CAN'T do it because they have signed an NDA

Their NDA probably covers themselves and their contractors. Fine, they can cut me (or anyone else) a check for one pound, and I'm now a paid contractor covered by their internal NDA. (admittedly, I've never seen their NDA, but if it limits them to internal, the "employees and contractors" language is fairly common).

In reply to:

all this... this.... discussion (to put it politely) is not because you won't be able to send the occasional software update to an empeg, but because you'd rather use your onion... no, cabbage... no, rutabaga... Oh! Got it! ...your Apple to do it instead?

Yes, because the MP3's I own all sit on the DVD-RAM discs that my Mac will happily read but which my windows machine won't read for [censored]. Now since the naming conventions on a mac differ from that of the windows machine, getting the long-filenames back and forth between the two units is a bit of a nightmare, and "one-box" support would be VERY nice, thankyouverymuch.

In reply to:

but since you don't even have your empeg yet...

Actually, I own two...Mk.I # 249, Mk.II # 25 ....

I wasn't trying to start a flame-war either, it just amazes me the amount of people whose response to the mere possibility that someone was unhappy with some aspect of the Empeg was to tell them to "stop whining".

I agree that, if the NDA Empeg signed literally forbids contractors from seeing the code, then everyone is screwed (although it is fairly easily gotten around... becoming an extremely-low-salaried person is always a possibility ) My contention was always "there's got to be a better way to do this that let's the masses who are willing to do the work for free.. do the work for free." The reactions to that possibility ranged from people claiming I was an open-source-zealot (which was funny because I didn't care what the license was, just the availability of working code ) to people claiming I wanted to change Empeg's whole business model (which couldn't be farther from the truth).

It was a bit of a sad commentary on the people how quick they were to jump all over me for suggesting the mere possibility that "there might be other ways to do something."

*sigh*

D