Kevin and I got to play with a Pepper Pad 3 early this year at the CES and were fairly impressed with it but it seems like the company behind it is in trouble. Mike Whalen has a Pepper Pad 3 and just let me know that owners are not getting support for problems with phone calls to support going straight to voicemail and emails bouncing back. A visit to the Pepper forums shows this posting from Pepper Computer CEO Len Kawell:
Pepper Computer is not dead, nor is it the end of Pepper Linux or thePepper Pad 3. However, it’s true that Pepper Computer, Inc. is goingthrough some significant changes right now. I apologize that we haven’tbeen very responsive to the forums and some Pepper Pad support requests.
As you probably can surmise, the original Pepper Pad and Hanbit’sPepper Pad 3 have not sold as well as, say the iPod. Since the originalPepper Pad (Pepper Pad 2) is no longer on the market and since PepperComputer is just the software developer for the Pepper Pad 3, we onlyreceive revenue when our OEMs sell devices. If they don’t sell enoughPepper-powered devices, we don’t receive enough revenue to employenough developers, so can’t significantly develop the Pepper Linuxsoftware.
This is exactly the position we’re in right now. We haven’t beenreceiving enough revenue, so we can’t afford to hire enough developers.In particular, some of the people you may know from this forum,including Sean, Steve and Kyle have had to leave Pepper for jobselsewhere.
However, Pepper Computer will continue to support the original PepperPad and Hanbit will continue to sell and support the Hanbit Pepper Pad3. (I promise we’ll strive to do a better job than we have the past fewweeks.) However, as these forums are not the official support channelfor either device, please use the appropriate direct support channel ifyou’re having specific hardware or software problems: http://www.pepper.com/forums/announcement.php?f=2
So what about the future? Hanbit is still actively working on futureimprovements to the Pepper Pad hardware. And we’ve done a lot of workon the Pepper Linux 4.0 software. The 4.0 software isn’t productionquality yet, but it has some pretty cool features and improvements sowe’d really like to finish it and make it widely available. To do that,we’re considering a couple of options: sell Pepper Linux to anothercompany to finish it and/or open source it.
If you know of someone interested in acquiring Pepper Linux, please let me know.
As far as open sourcing Pepper Linux, we’ve been working on opensourcing all of Pepper Linux for quite a while. If you’re involved inany OSS projects, you’re probably aware that they require somesignificant work to setup and sponsor. We think we’ve got a lot of theheavy lifting done to create an OSS project, but it will take someadditional work to wrap it up.
So another question for you is: would you be interested inparticipating in an open source Pepper Linux project? The project wouldinclude all of the Pepper application framework and application suite(mostly written in Java and XUL) as well as the Fedora and Mozilla/Jrexmodifications that we’ve done (mostly C and C++). There are only a fewparts that we can’t open source because we license them as binary fromother 3rd party developers (e.g., the photo editing modules and Flashand Acrobat).
If you have any other ideas or suggestions for continuing to improvePepper Linux, please let us know. You’re welcome to post them on thisforum, or send them directly to me via email: len.kawell at pepper.com.
Thanks very much for your continued support and our apologies for the recent period of silence.
Len Kawell
CEO, Pepper Computer, Inc.
I must be the only person who’s never heard of Hanbit who Pepper says is solely responsible for the support of the hardware and software of the Pepper Pad 3 but I did track down a link to their Pepper Pad 3 website if anyone needs it. I don’t know if it will do anyone any good but with Pepper Computer not actively working nor supporting the software any longer I certainly wouldn’t buy one unless they went with a bargain fire sale.
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