Quote:
Hans wrote:
Generally speaking, to get an NDA with a company for technical documentation requires convincing them that giving us the docs will make them a lot of money. This is because we'd be taking up their engineers' time with questions about any confusing and missing parts of the documentation. We're not really in the position to make them a lot of money.
I've had far more success than rejections. Successes include ATI (before AMD), AMD, Uli, PA Semi, Via, PLX Tech, Jmicron, Freescale, and others. Rejections include Nvidia, Intel, Ricoh. Nether list is all-inclusive, but what I can remember off the top of my head has more than doule the successes than failures.
My guidelines to getting an NDA with such people, for a hobbyist sort of project like I've ben involved in myself:
1) Try. you certainly don't get what you don't ask for. Heck, Via's response to my NDA request was a PDF file in a reply email, nothing else.
2) Have a legitimate company in a relevant industry. Your company sounds like image processing, which is related to video processing, which is very relevant to this thread's stated topic.
3) Have a professional website for said company of yours. Most vendors do check up on you before calling or emailing.
4) It's OK to be a startup company. (I talk about our company here being an embedded system design house, which we do aspire to be, and have a variety of non-Amiga projects like that)
5) Do NOT say the A-word. No one takes Amiga seriously anymore out there. Sorry. Instead, talk Linux, QNX, or some other embedded OS that may need driver improvement in, and would reasonably be part of or host to your intended product, with the intent of sharing code with what we in this discussion want to happen. (same for design modularity/reuse in a hardware project)
6) Be honest. Try not to talk about Amiga. If you find yourself getting herded into saying that, don't lie your way out of it. Code sharing with an oddball platform that interests you isn't a bad thing. Exaggerate a little, but liing will get you in trouble at some point.
7) Be closed-source/proprietary. you won't get NDA protected documentation for an open-source project. Closed-source is the way to go.
I believe Hans fits my own guidelines pretty well, and I'd encourage him to have a go at requesting NDA to these things. I'd encourage trying via the AMD Embedded Developer Support site. it's relatively easy to get into that, and it has a path to the Embedded Discrete Graphics products group NDA. That wasn't hard either. Once there, you may have contact with the right people to ask about the video acceleration NDA, or someone who can help get you to the right people.
Doesn't hurt to ask. Maybe they'll say no, but at least give them the opportunity to say yes.