Hey Guys,
Sorry to leave this thread festering for a little while. It looks like there has been a lot of great discussion about what to do with F4 and the rest of the line, although it has gotten of topic form the title a bit ;) We have spent the last couple of weeks working to meet some tight deadlines and have not had a chance to participate on the forums as much.
The good news is that we have started in earnest the migration to the F4 line for future products. We are very excited about that, as well as the timing in relation to the release of the Due (which should be released soon...?). We will post on the blog with the details of the libmaple upgrade to F4 as soon as we have a solid footing of a codebase to show off.
There have also been some questions on this thread as to the exact nature of LeafLabs - is it students, or a bunch of full time people, or whatever. There are three groups of people that contribute to Maple in various ways. First there is you, the users and contributors who do a wonderful job of keeping Maple active on the forums and elsewhere on the internet, using it in your projects, occasionally pushing patches and libraries, and working on the wiki - not to mention buying boards - thanks! Second, there is the larger family of LeafLabs folks, 8 people, a mix of undergrads, grads, and professional people who have put in substantial hours at one point or another - people like iperry, and okie on the forums. It was this group that turned nothing into something with the original Maple and Maple mini hardware designs, the first versions of libmaple, the website, lots of projects and testing, and word-spreading.
Finally there is LeafLabs, LLC. Currently 4 (of those original 8) full time people (myself included) who make a living designing and building embedded systems of all types for all sorts of organizations. We have been using Maple very effectively to build and deliver systems that would have been way out-of-budget otherwise. Not all of our projects are Maple based, but the best part is that the Maple line and libraries will continue to benefit from all the ones that are...for example the facelift to F4.
The fact is that our primary business is not selling Maple boards. However, the continued support and development of our stm32 and (upcoming) fpga based products is essential to supporting our many projects, so you can rest easy knowing that we will continue to develop and support them.
Finally, we have also been committed to supporting the open source and open source hardware communities by publishing as much of our work as possible under open licenses. For those of you that have experience in mixing business and open source, you may understand that this is not only the right thing to do but also an investment that pays itself back many times over. We will continue to take every opportunity to push our work back to the community.
