Hi again :-)
LOL, there is no price list, and the chances of me ever selling anything related other than maybe my time one day is slim to none. Money is more easily made writing software than selling PCBs ;-) Thanks for allowing me to attempt to clear things up from my point of view.
The board software tells me I've typed too much, so I'll split it over a few posts if that's OK.
Can you define spin off? To me it implies uses some part of the other project and is a descendant of it. If you define it the same way then it is in no way a spin off. If you define it as "SOME of the users have used MS before and posted on msextra etc" then sure, but I think that definition is fundamentally flawed. To be crystal clear, absolutely NO part of the code is anything to do with MS AT ALL. I'd be offended if someone compared my code with that found in MS land, at least on a style/structure level anyway. If compared with on a functional level one day I'd be proud to come close to what Ken and James have achieved for most users including myself.
The biggest con FreeEMS has is that its only 25% finished and doesn't do anything all that useful just yet. That will change pretty soon though :-) Cons for MS... That deserves another thread, but the main one is hardware. Specifically grounding, power and not being able to legally make your own and improve some of the flaws present. It is conceivable that a skilled individual could get an engine running for under 50 us dollars with FreeEMS. That simply isn't possible with MegaSquirt, at least, not legally. In that vane, for the same price as a v3 and ms2 you could have 6 cylinder sequential and proper grounding. The benefits of profit-margin-less designs should be fairly major. Not to mention that dozens of people put input into the open designs ensuring the chance of a flaw making it to the board printer is fairly slim. Anything seriously wrong will generate a public comment saying "no, fix that!!" fairly quickly.
That is probably true. A conservative view is that ms1 is good from 100 - 150hp/litre and ms2 from 150 - 200hp/litre. With a large capacity engine (read v8) that is rarely a limitation. Obviously you can do a LOT more than that with few issues, but injector size gets to shaft you in the end with batch injection either by opening time error or latency and response due to insufficiently up to date pulse widths. Worst case you get a high non-smooth idle. I love ms2extra, it works great, but doesn't meet all of my needs, especially being able to change the board and code and share it 100% freely.
MS3 probably won't be out before next year. FreeEMS on the other hand should be up and humming by then. Only time will tell if my confidence is for good reason or not though :-) There are many unseen traps that could hold us up along the way!
TBC...