It is perfectly OK to give away your products as long as you do that to an audience that wouldn't buy it for the normal retail price int he first place. Why shouldn't that apply to Hardware except that instead of for free you give it away for the raw manufacturing costs with a spatial fully featured but only allowed for research and educational use firmware.
Isn't that exactly what Rigol is doing with the DS1054Z? Everybody knows how to unlock the extra bandwidth/features so if you're prepared to hack it you can get their 1100 Euro 'scope for 300 Euros. Companies, etc., will still buy the full DS1104Z.
And...just like Microsoft they also have an interest in getting the young hackers used to the "Rigol" brand so that's the hardware they'll buy at full price when they go to get a proper job.
Yes and thats great!
But the issue is not with Rigol but with Saleae Logic analyzer's that are possibly very overpriced while still being targeted on the enthusiast not commercial market.
What do you think pays for their website? For their support team? For them continuing to refine the software?
I never used their support. And continuing to refine the software should be payed by the commercial users with disposable income or whom expect a return on investment.
It is insane to expect a small company to give you their product for free just because you claim you're not going to make money from it.
Thats what firmware licenses are for.
Do you seriously expect a home user of an really expensive peace of equipment to ever have a return of investment? Seriously? Seriously?!
Now please lets go back to topic.....
Thinking about the limitations of the MSO1074z mostly the memory depth of only 12 Mpts @ 8CH, 6 Mpts @ 16CH...
I never used a standalone protocol analyzer, only the Saleae unit evaluating the dumped data streams with own software/scripts.
Here I head basically a endless memory depth streaming to SSD...
I'm aware that that probably wont be the case with the MSO1074z as using its GBit connection I could stream with at most 100 Mb/s (thats neglecting almost any overhead that may there be) so 100 MHz with 8 channels or 50MHz with 16 channels. If the unit even supports this, what it may not.
Does it?Now obviously to watch logic levels in real time you need only 60Hz LOL...
So my question would be what use there is from a 1GS/s logic analyzer with only a 12 Mpts memory depth, I understand that you can trigger this on a significant event but what are the typical use cases here?
Despite of my desire to have a MSO, I guess I may be better of with a DS1054Z and some reasonably priced PC based Logic analyzer that wont have a limited memory depth...
what do you think?