Actually, Yamaha's exclusive license to John Chowning's FM tech which was developed at Stanford has been expired for a while now, so it's more or less "safe" now to do algorithmic FM if your company isn't Yamaha. But that was a bitch to deal with back then; most any company that attempted to head in that direction got dinged pretty hard by their lawyers. The only one I know of that dodged those courtroom bullets was NED, as the FM implementation on the Synclavier systems predated Yamaha's use, so they had to eat a bit of crow there. And the license being done means that we can have toys like, say, the Akemie's Castle...which gives you algorithmic FM with CVs. Wild!
Fact is, though...if Uli was better-behaved and housebroken, you wouldn't see nearly as much push-back as you do these days where Behringer's concerned. But he doesn't play nice, and has a long history of not doing so, either. Even so...the synths they've released are astonishingly GOOD; the Pro-1 is about as spot-on a copy of the Sequential Pro-One as you'll ever hear, the B.2600 (even the "Xmas tree" version) behaves exactly like a newer ARP 2600, one of which I did get to use from time to time in the early 1980s, and so on. And it's...
1) Available to purchase, and...
2) It's not "crippleware" like Korg's 2600M, and...
3) It doesn't have its origin in some very sus "make the celebs jump for joy...and f*ck everyone else" marketing BS, like the 2600FS. Or rather, it's the "antidote" to that. So yeah, I'm down with how these market disruptors are shaking up the idea that a "vintage synth" should cost you a kidney and then some. FYI, I find it very telling that Sweetwater is NOT stocking the Korg 2600M...the 2600FiaSco s**tshow was apparently something that Chuck and Co. took a VERY dim view of.
But yeah...I'm personally waiting for a $500 FPGA synth, or maybe we can prod Behringer into "copying" a synth that uses a synthesis engine that's Public Domain...namely, the "Bell Labs" synth (at Oberlin's TIMARA facility these days), which begat the Crumar GDS, which begat the DK Synergy and Synergy II, and then these begat the Mulogix Slave32 Expander. It's a cheap AF design these days, and could probably be done for $400-700 as it avoided the use of proprietal/esoteric parts, and the current state of microprocessors makes the original synth seem like it's made out of rocks and sticks. THAT would definitely be a welcome development, as none of those synths ever had huge release numbers and, in fact, were WAAAAAY ahead of their time.
Anyway, rambling...time to hit the sack/oil mod/Eliane Radigue CD thing...