Yeah OK, what I was referring to came from a video recording from the Clone-A presentation at Breakpoint 2007, and it turned out I didn't recall it quite correctly. While Jens had tried to get an official license, he also mentioned two possible options he had for kickstart substitution (of which none would be able to boot WB however). He obviously had great problems in getting a license, and he wasn't even entirely sure who was the legitimate IP owner. But there were indeed ways around it.
Anyway, if anyone haven't seen the presentation, here it is:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7945941150233337270#
All in all a very interesting presentation, and here are a few highlights:
At 25:30 min he mentions the kind of device he plans for Clone-A
At 29:30 and 36:00 he talks about turning the FPGA VHDL program into a single ASIC chip for mass volume production at really low costs.
At 37:00 he talks about the financial obstacles and the requirement of investors
At 42:30 he mentions the IP situation, licensing problems, and the replacement options.
He was obviously estimating an end user release at the end of 2007, and since I am fairly sure that this time estimation was from a technological point of view (things had progressed quite far and was kind of ready, as seen from demonstrations), I guess what *really* stopped the show, was a lack of investors and/or commercial soundness for a low cost, mass volume ASIC based Clone-A.
Just watched the vid, pity it did not happen. Still hope it appears one day.
