@jeckson
Thank you for the encouraging words, I've spent the last year down in my basement working on the technical side of the OpenBench Logic Sniffer and the Papilio projects. Now that they are finally to a state where most of the technical work is done I'm starting to try and open dialog more and figure out issues like the non-commercial vs. trademark problem. What I'm finding is that I need to have pretty thick skin! A lot of responses seem to be pretty critical so I really appreciate a positive post. I kind of assumed that people would be happy about an Open Source FPGA board that is easy to use. So I'm a little surprised by comments like the one about patenting other peoples ideas. I'm talking about Trademarking the Papilio name not patenting the Arduino "idea". I don't feel like I am ripping off the Arduino idea, I'm recognizing that it is a good idea that people like and am trying to apply it somewhere else that might provide the same types of benefits for people. An idea is just that, an idea, there has still been a tremendous amount of work, a years worth of my full time work, involved with making the Papilio a reality. It would be different if I just made some changes to the published Arduino board but that is not the case here. I created a new board from scratch in a niche that has nothing like it and am embracing existing Open Source projects to make it as useful as possible.
Maybe I've somehow come across as abrasive or trying to overly promote my work and if that is the case then I apologize. My intention with this post has been to let the Arduino team know about the work I'm doing, I know I would want to be informed, and to solicit some advice on the Trademarking issue.
On a side note, I wasn't personally involved with the development of the Bus Pirate. That is the awesome work of Ian Lesnet over at Dangerous Prototypes. Ian and I partnered together to make the OpenBench Logic Sniffer, he did the microcontroller side and I did the FPGA side. With Open Source it is so easy for the lines to get blurred about who did what. Everyone is building on the work of others and it can get confusing. The exciting thing is that the end result can be really cool new things like an Open Source Logic Analyzer and FPGA development board.
Sincerely,
Jack Gassett