@alex
Why on earth would Hyperion want to delay the release of OS4? They are/have been funding the work themselves, on a limited budget. Any delays have been pretty much out of their control, with the exception of the BIOS work, which was pretty much a must-have anyway (and of course, speeded up delivery of the A1's).
If you scout around the Amiga news sites, you'd have seen that the OS is not quite in a releaseable state, to the point of not really even being a proper 'Beta' release. However, the OS4 roadshow will be able to display for all to see that work has been done (both on the surface and under the skin). This will also give people a chance to see that Hyperions way of implementing their 68k emulator does work.
I'm sure anyone involved in the Amiga market today is neither blind or stupid enough to think that the streets of Amigaland are paved in gold. Those that are around now know it's along, hard slog to earn a few crumbs and Amiga sales alone cannot support even the most tightly run business's.
You can bet your bottom dollar that both Alan at Eyetech and Ben at Hyperion could both easily be certified insane at what many would call 'Suicidal' business decisions in getting involved in this project.
Don't think that any royalties received from Amigaone/OS4 sales will make a huge difference to where Amiga Inc stand today; they will stand or fall on their AmigaDE alone, as OS4 was never ever mentioned when they were touting for investors. Eyetech have a long term view as to what is possible and anyone with an iota of common sense woud know the the current phase is to suit existing Amiga users only. As and when a more feature rich (OS4.1) OS is available, along with alternative hardware, more mainstream consumers will be targeted.
If you want to compare OS4 to OSX consider this (from a release stand point only, NOT from a technical or feature list angle):
OS4 will be a .0 release (ie OS4.0), which will have certain aspects of it either not implemented, or not as functional as some would like. This compares to the state of OSX that you mentioned. To release OS4 now would be total madness in it's incomplete state.
The whole idea is to get all the features working that were listed by Hyperion. Docs will then become available to support the programming community and enable a new wave of applications to support the new hardware and OS features.
Until this happens, Eyetech will sell amigaones with Linux to run on, to those who want them . Hyperion have always stated that OS4 will be released 'When It's Ready' (tm) and not before.
It's your choice if you want to go down the MOS route. It's a free world (etc, etc) so your choice is your own and no one has any right to tell you anything else.
But those of us that are patient enough to wait some more, will wait for OS4.
-john
