it's not about payment or "developer fees", it's about AMD stealing our mojo
what we meant was if you had a fee for it, would you be able to not have it open source? as the part you built you can charge under a closed license?
I could charge for GPL licensed software, yes, but I would have to give anyone the source code on request
This has a couple of side effects for us
a) people can remove any "developer fee" code we might have added and distribute fee-less binaries.
b) AMD miners can steal our mojo (because they have source code access and do a straight port to OpenCL)
c) people can redistribute this without charging, circumventing any software storefront we might have set up
for the initial distribution.
and we couldn't do diddly-squat about a), b) or c) (it's all considered legal)
So it's clearly not the way for us to go. And besides, we don't have that miracle groestl yet. It's under development.