Arrow does this....they would supply pre-programmed parts to manufacturing. Now of course it was code developed inhouse, so we owned it and they supplied the raw parts as well. But I would imagine they could work a deal like this. >From: William Chops Westfield >Reply-To: pic microcontroller discussion list >To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU >Subject: Re: [PIC]:Royalties >Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 18:02:53 PDT > > Another possibility is to find a distributor that offers a device > programming service, or a third-party programmer. You set up a deal > whereby the programming house holds the code. The mfr places an order > for programmed parts with them at a price that includes your royalty, > which the programmer then sends to you. > >I'd love to hear if anyone finds such a service. It seems pretty ideal >for a number of reasons, but I've never heard of a service that can >break out a royalty and send that profit elsewhere... It potentially >solves the "source code escrow" issue as well... (OTOH, I doubt whether >anyone wants to pay this third party as much as the service would cost >to provide.) > > >Speaking from the other side of things, having to track and pay per-box >(or worse) royalties is a real PITA for a large company selling a >diverse product set, with each device possibly containing multiple >pieces of licensed software. DEC charges (used to charge) a per-port >royalty to companies who had licensed their LAT protocol, which doesn't >sound bad until you realize that we were selling products that were >expandable, and had (for instance) no way of telling whether the 16 port >expansion card was going into a box that was supposed to contain LAT or >not. For that matter, we really didn't want to sell a separate version >of software (it would have ended up being different versions) containing >LAT just to enforce DECs royalty policy... It was awful. We did our >best and sent DEC money periodicly, and they never seemed to get pissed >off at us, but... (It especially hurt because most of our competitors >hadn't bother to license the protocol from DEC at all...) > >BillW > >-- >http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList >mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics