Hi Kano,
I'd like to clarify what has previously been clarified elsewhere more than once. (maybe you missed it).
It's always been company policy to support as many software miners as possible. We've paid coding bounties for specific features (Luke Jr) Serge & others, we have extended hardware availability and we have repeatedly offered log in access to equipment (both singles and mini rigs) to anyone wishing to pursue software development.
We have enjoyed fruitful relationships with the developers of all the major software miners. You're the only one who's been difficult in any way. Everyone else including ckolivas has been helpful, kind and informative.
Regarding the launch of ASIC, we have previously pledged early ASIC devices to ckolivas, ufasoft, bitminter & BFG authors.
BFL
Hi Josh,
well my entire rant comes from the knowledge that BFL were only supplying remote access to their devices from software development and no devices have EVER been supplied to developers (without expecting the developer to pay for it)
I will also add that ATI do not care if no one was GPU mining - their profits from BTC mining GPUs must be so small that they are probably insignificant.
BFL, on the other hand, has been able to sell every items of stock they have (according to your comment above) and the developers on the different mining software are certainly a part of the reason for that.
Even with the minirig, it's a fact that BFL have only supplied remote access to get software development working on them.
It's not a big cost to supply a single MiniRig card to a developer, but that has never happened.
Yes it is a give and take issue - I just have only seen it as a take issue by BFL - who to this day still does not have a piece of mining software of their own - though as you have corrected me, you did pay Ufasoft to do their implementation.
I will also state the obvious, that you clearly seem to agree with as of yesterday, that developers having the hardware means the software is constantly tuned to increase the performance of that hardware.
When ckolivas has worked on BFL improvements (e.g. the LP abort code that I requested long ago but was not implemented until he did that - that I didn't do due to ... reasons ...) he has certainly not provided the optimum support for the BFL devices simply due to the fact that he doesn't have one. As simple as that.
Oh yeah - and e-penis size may or may not be important to some, but is certainly not relevant to cgminer ...