who will reprogram this if a new algo is born?
How about the DEVFee?
The devfee depends on the dev, as gpuhoarder eluded to in the previous post... There will likely be many devs coming out with bitstreams and software. Whitefire was just the first to announce. We are considering developing a platform that would allow any dev to develop firmwares for the boards and provide the development environment. The devfee collected on our software would depend on what devfee the dev wanted to set.
I'm also doing this now. And any algo on which they want to earn I'll release on github for free.
Most of the algorithms out there already exist published "for free" - that isn't the hard part. They'd still need expensive software licenses + lots of time and reasonable sets of skills to synthesize + deploy bitstreams for a variety of hardware. Not to mention we tend to be doing a lot of floor planning, rapid re-configuration, and other things beyond some verilog/VHDL.
Typically speaking, especially for things like this where there is a very real high cost (in software and hardware + time) to produce the bitstreams, you will get what you pay for.