Well at least these guys seem to be promoting the whole open source thing, and are mainly interested in selling chips. People are already working with their designs and could have an open sourced miner pretty quickly.
And what that change if chips will be priced like 50$? No one will make open sourced miners becuse it will not to be economical...
if is the biggest 2 letter word in the English language.
What if they had 1,000,000 chips made each one cost them 4 dollars. Or 4,000,000 for the lot
They are clever and realize selling 600,000 at 12 dollars each = 7.2 million a nice 3.2 million profit - shipping and other expenses = Maybe 2 million profit and 400,000 free chips.
My point is selling at 12 to 20 a chip is feasible. Base on my if just as much as selling for 50 a chip on your if.