“Open Graphics Project founder Timothy Miller recently noted on
the project’s mailing list that they are set to announce that their
first hardware, the OGD1, is ready for pre-order. ‘The OGD1 design
has actually been finished for a couple of months now,’ he began,
explaining that they’ve been setting up a way to process pre-orders
for the first 100 boards. The board will retail at $1,500, with a
$100 discount offered for the first 100 pre-orders. ‘These are
pre-orders, not orders,’ Timothy continued, ‘that means the lead
time is unpredictable. We don’t have a stock. We will purchase a
stock based on the number of pre-orders we get. Also, this means
that if we never get a large enough number of pre-orders, we will
be unable to fulfill them; all pre-orders would be canceled, and no
one would be charged anything.’ He then explained that though the
OGD1 could function as a graphics card, it is instead offered as a
competitively priced FPGA development kit, ‘we need to make it
clear what OGD1 is and why buying one is an important step for Free
Software…'”