what makes a group of developers the court and judge of the market?
What makes anyone judge of the market? Do you want to say that a group of developers should no longer be in control of their product? Like, that I have any sort of obligation to write my software for a specific set of hardware?
Next thing that might happen is that developer x is unsatisfied with the ethics of Hyperion and blocks his software to run on the A1
Hyperion has never done anything like that, a claim easily proven by the fact that our 68k software runs on Amithlon/XL and our PPC software runs on MorphOS to a certain degree. We didn't ever block anything, and we don't do so on OS 4. However, as I already stated, OSes don't port themselves.
It was claimed that the scheme is used to protect IP by complicating piracy with a hardware device.
Among other things, yes. Surely you will agree that piracy on the Amiga tends to be a problem when you can find rips of Heretic II 12 hours after the game was released.
However, as has been mentioned before too, taking away the burden of support from us to the respective hardware vendor is also part of the scheme. That is because the mainboard vendor knows his mainboard better than we do, and unless the problem is more general in nature, the mainboard vendor would know the answer to the problem better. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Some claim that Hyperion has to cover high development costs, in a small market, and that justifies milking money from the mainboard manufacturer, on top of charging customers for supplying the OS
I am highly offended by your use of the word "milking". It suggests something illegal. There is nothing illegal going on. You don't happen to agree to the licencing, but that doesn't mean we're milking anyone. Again, do you have
any idea about what amount of money we're talking here? I don't think so, so your term "milking" is at least as offensive as what you suggested about Ben's comment.
Considering that the mainboard manufacturer has had considerably higher development costs, I don't see the moral justification for the software side charging the hardware side.
You don't know our expenses on OS 4. You don't know how much the software side would charge the hardware side. Yet, you take it upon yourself to judge us as "milking" hardware developers.