What happened to EruWare?

[nolancapehart]

Many of you have been wondering what has happened to EruWare. Although I would have liked to avoid discussing the details for many reasons, I will endeavor to give a description of the current state of EruWare sufficient to satisfy at least some of your natural curiousity and to assure you that you will receive your money's worth from your purchase of the CF Driver.

I do not ask you to take my word for everything. All I ask is that you do not jump to conclusions, and that you use your mind when considering what to believe.

For many months, there have been major disagreements between the founders of EruWare as to how to conduct business. This has included such questions as:

* What level of quality shall we build into our products?

* What level of customer service shall we provide?

* If many customers have the same problem with one of our products, shall we shrug our shoulders and say "Too Bad!", or shall we find out how we can make our product easier to use?

* Shall we promise to add a certain feature to an existing product, then neglect to do so because it is more fun to work on a new product?

* What value shall we place on honesty, integrity, and honor?

Besides the tension and poor business practices that are naturally caused by such disagreements, EruWare has been hugely affected by some founders actively sabotaging EruWare by convincing PalmGear, Handango, and others not to sell our products, by diverting EruWare money to their personal bank accounts out of proportion to what they should have received, and by inviting the hacking of our products. The time and attention necessary to deal with these problems has diverted precious resources from support and improvement of the EruWare CF Driver. At the same time, these founders stopped supporting the CF Driver and secretly established a business to compete with EruWare, all the while receiving a share of EruWare's profits.

I personally have lost a friend in this business, a friend that I have worked with for most of the last three years. But, each of us makes our own choices in life, and each of us is responsible for the consequences of those choices.

I take our commitments to our customers very seriously, and I will not sell a product with the promise of free upgrades for life, and then stop supporting our customers or abandon development before the product is one with which I would be happy as a customer.

I and others from EruWare have started a new company named Athena America, and we have dedicated ourselves to continuing the support and development of the CF Driver. We are providing all owners of the EruWare CF Driver with free lifetime upgrades of the new product, the "Athena CF Enabler". Our first version includes support for NX73V's and NX80V's and a much simplified registration scheme.

In this endeavor, if you have the time, I wish to ask for your help. The code base for the old EruWare CF Driver was, frankly, awful in many respects. We are in the process of completely rewriting it, but until that is accomplished, and also because of the likelihood that we will not catch all of the bugs, we would like to ask you to send us an email if you encounter a bug in the Athena CF Enabler. It is not necessary to write a lot of information (but it is often helpful), but please do try to write enough so that we will be able to cause the bug to occur, and to recognize it when it does occur. In particular, it will help if we know which Clié model you are using.

Regards,
Nolan Capehart

[ayasin]

Imagine my surprise to find this post here. For those here at ClieSource I have tried not to really bring too much light onto this issue because I didn't feel it was right. But since this has been posted I'll respond to the points made here. There's lots of other stuff that went on but since my lawyers are dealing with that we'll leave it to them.

Originally posted by nolancapehart

I do not ask you to take my word for everything. All I ask is that you do not jump to conclusions, and that you use your mind when considering what to believe.
I'm also not asking you to take my word for everything. I'll be posting documentation to back up the claims (where possible).

For many months, there have been major disagreements between the founders of EruWare as to how to conduct business.
Actaully the disagreement was about bringing on a thrid partner who wanted to have full 1/3 partnership from the first day.

This has included such questions as:

* What level of quality shall we build into our products?

* What level of customer service shall we provide?

* If many customers have the same problem with one of our products, shall we shrug our shoulders and say "Too Bad!", or shall we find out how we can make our product easier to use?

* Shall we promise to add a certain feature to an existing product, then neglect to do so because it is more fun to work on a new product?

* What value shall we place on honesty, integrity, and honor?
I would ask people to look at the now 2 companies. PDAscent and Athena America. Which driver is easier to use? Which driver is more user friendly? Who has absolute transparency in their process (PDAscent has a forum where you can see exactly what's going on)? Who charges up front for upgrades? Who tried to raise the price of their driver to $34.00 (when I found out about this I had it set back by arguing with Nolan long enough)?

Besides the tension and poor business practices that are naturally caused by such disagreements,
Such as having to retain councel to get anything done.
EruWare has been hugely affected by some founders actively sabotaging EruWare by convincing PalmGear, Handango, and others not to sell our products,
Well since my lawyers sent these letters I would hardly call it sabotage. What the letters said is basically "There's a dispute, please stop selling and hold the checks until it's resolved." My lawyers also sent multiple letters to try to resolved the dispute all of which were received (certified mail) but none were responded to.
by diverting EruWare money to their personal bank accounts out of proportion to what they should have received
You must be refering here to Nolan setting paypal to transfer funds into his wife's personal account and then changing the Paypal password. This was definately wrong so I can hardly argue there.
and by inviting the hacking of our products.
Since you didn't write the driver or utility code I wouldn't expect you to understand that there's little chance that someone could hack it. If someone were able to hack it they would have enough knowledge to write their own driver so it would be a non issue. Also I never invited anyone to hack it....I merely said they were welcome to try in response to a post about hacking.
The time and attention necessary to deal with these problems has diverted precious resources from support and improvement of the EruWare CF Driver. At the same time, these founders stopped supporting the CF Driver and secretly established a business to compete with EruWare, all the while receiving a share of EruWare's profits.
Wow that's just blatently false. There was no competition with EruWare until after the final letters from my lawyers. Also there's no competition with EruWare NOW. You sell a product that was stolen from me and I sell another product which I wrote.

I personally have lost a friend in this business, a friend that I have worked with for most of the last three years. But, each of us makes our own choices in life, and each of us is responsible for the consequences of those choices.
I agree that everyone has to make their choices. After I told you about this idea (which I had from reading cliesource...you didn't even know what PalmOS was at the time) we worked together day and night to get this started. You ate dinner at my house (with my family) more times than I can count. We treated you like family and when your buddy (who's name I won't mention) started demanding a third of the company you decided that the friendship you had there was more important than the one you had here. To that end you spent the better part of 2 months trying to convince me that if he wasn't made a partner you were going to leave. While I worked on the driver you worked on getting him into the company.

I take our commitments to our customers very seriously, and I will not sell a product with the promise of free upgrades for life, and then stop supporting our customers or abandon development before the product is one with which I would be happy as a customer.

Nor would I have if you hadn't taken the finances and refused to hand over passwords to accounts. I like our customers, but I'm not going to jail for them because you think you're an attorney/CPA on top of everything else.

I and others from EruWare have started a new company named Athena America, You're the only person from EruWare at Athena America. Everyone else works for PDAscent now.

and we have dedicated ourselves to continuing the support and development of the CF Driver. We are providing all owners of the EruWare CF Driver with free lifetime upgrades of the new product, the "Athena CF Enabler". Our first version includes support for NX73V's and NX80V's and a much simplified registration scheme.
Glad to hear it since you have taken all the money, website and customer data with you when you left.


In this endeavor, if you have the time, I wish to ask for your help. The code base for the old EruWare CF Driver was, frankly, awful in many respects. We are in the process of completely rewriting it
I won't even respond to that other than to say good...rewrite it and stop living off my work. Instead of making baseless accusations you should focus your energies into positive persuits.

[The Missus]

Gee Nolan, I have to ask, "What were you thinking?" When the company started (Eruware) your friend (still not saying his name but he knows who he is) wasn't even in the country. Let's put this in a perspective that everyone can understand. Check his passport. You falsify that you go to jail. He wasn't part of Eruware, never was until after the legal dissolving of the company. I use the term that the company was "dissolved" because your lack of response to the letters issued to you had a deadline for response to comply with the partnership agreement. The same agreement you wrote up, you signed along with ayasin. After dissolving the company, neither partner legally could use the name or product. ayasin chose to start a different company and he wrote a different driver. As a friend you should be happy for him. Our clients seem to like the CF Magic product.
Starting the Eruware company was a huge risk, you and ayasin were brilliant but in different areas. He wrote the driver and docs and you did the technical stuff. It was great. This all changed when your pal got back in the country and starting making outrageous demands. Against my urging ayasin actually tried to accomodate him by making offers to bring him in on his merits. This meaning he would actually have to show some value to the company before he becomes a full partner. Nobody gets something for nothing. I saw these offers and I gotta say I know a lot of people that would give their right arms for the same offer.
Anyway, he didn't accept the offers and wouldn't bend from his demands of being a third partner from the start. Later, I find this has something to do with some "legacy" need.
On a personal level, I was your friend too, and your wifes and your families. I don't really understand why you felt you needed to do what you did. It's over now, you can't take back what you do or say. You can only go on from where you stand. I hope in the future you think about what you do before you do things you regret. You have a future in fixing small appliances (the freezer is putting out ice like there's no tomorrow) and your friend. He makes a grand cup of coffee. Maybe St******s should worry. We aren't going to worry though. The software we write is good stuff. Anyone can see that. So good luck, take care and see ya. Lucy

[gnlew]

Is there any benefit to the 2.0 version of Athenaware? What are you guys going to do? Have you switched to Ayasin's driver? Or did you upgrade to Athena's?:rolleyes:

[Dripps]

I have upgraded to Athena's new driver (since I already paid for it long ago) and find some small improvements. For my use this is fine. The use of a compact flash I believe is never going to be as smooth as the use of the memory stick but these inconveniences are ok because of benefits of having 1 Gig of memory along with me....even if I have to soft reset a few times or switch between things a few times. It's fine. I hesitate to pay for another driver which seems to have it's own limitations. I've printed out the directions to use Peleca's driver but haven't had the courage or time to give it a try. And that's FREE. Wouldn't it make sense to use that before buying another driver if I'm unhappy with Athena/Eruware? It's just not worth the effort right now...it works...leave well enough alone and take each improvement if/when it comes along for now. Until there is perfect driver/method of using CF seemlessly I'm happy enough.

[gnlew]

Originally posted by Dripps
I have upgraded to Athena's new driver (since I already paid for it long ago) and find some small improvements. For my use this is fine. ..

I hesitate to pay for another driver which seems to have it's own limitations. I've printed out the directions to use Peleca's driver but haven't had the courage or time to give it a try...


It's just not worth the effort right now...it works...leave well enough alone and take each improvement if/when it comes along for now. Until there is perfect driver/method of using CF seemlessly I'm happy enough.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, I guess I will try the Athena as well to see how it fares.

During all this shenanigans, I purchased a 512Mb Mem Stick Pro and have not been using my CF that much. Just been leaving my WL100 in the CF slot.

[rob_squared]

This reminds me of a soap opera. But one I vaguely care about.

[networker]

Instead of judging which person/company is right, I would like to point to the direction that either compnay needs to concentrate.

There are many more CF devices out there which we all would like to add to our Clie. Unfortunately, Sony is not providing and our devices are underutilized.

If I had worked out the details of CF interface, I would approach manufacturers of CF add-on peripherals and offer to write drivers for Clie series. The drivers can be provided by the device manufacturer (and the driver company would get some compensation) or the manufacturer would point to their web site where these companies providing the driver at a nominal fee and support. Perhaps, even a combination.

There are many exciting products out there. Be creative! Don't artificially limit yourself to CF storage.

[gnlew]

Yes, it would be good for us in the NX community to have new products developed. I was one of the Visor faithful as the springboard made sense to me.

Now that the UX 50 has come out though, is there reason for manufacturers to come out with more devices? Can the existing devices designed for PDA/CF be really migrated to fit OS5.x?

If they could, count me in on GPS devices and MicroDrives (may be moot as CF Cards drop in price).