I actually had hoped that Gateway would do something good when they obtained the rights. :-/ But they really had no real interest in meeting the needs of the Amiga Community either IMO.
If only the community could get the rights -- I have no problem with someone making fair profit from sales of licenses of the OS and other software... but any company should work (a lot harder than A.Inc seems to be) to meet the needs of the community of folks (us) who have kept the platform viable since Commodore went under. I too, feel that the rights should fall to folks who want to work with the existing community. Again, IMO, A.Inc really only cares that the AmigaOS was small and efficient and therefore could be used in small embedded devices... that seems to be their main focus, not making desktop OS's.
I suppose it is cool that my cell phone could one day play the old Sierra Games and such, but that is not the direction they seem to want to go either. Repurposing AmigaOS for embedded devices is really kind of cool, but in the market right now, it competes with Linux and that embedded Windows OS (used to be called WindowsCE, think now it is called "PocketPC" IIRC). Anyways, it is just "mini me" of Windows. Since I like Linux, I find that to be the way to go with the embedded market. Palm is still hanging in there as well... so I feel that it is bad form to try to repurpose AmigaOS in this way, although I understand (and admire) the reasons for doing this based on how few resources AmigaOS needs to get things done!
Don't get me wrong, I totally would like to see a company get behind the platform and revitalize us and would like to see OS 4 become more than just vapourware as well.
Anyhow, I think at this point, we are going to have two camps (like I said before -- this is your current Macintosh situation as well -- although the difference obviously is that Apple did not go under and be out of the industry for 20 years with so much catch up to "modernize" their OS). The first camp is going to be "Classic (Retro) Amiga" and that camp is going to be unsupported by and large except by each other -- no real change here for us! The second camp would be the new/modern Amiga OS (4+) and would be hopefully making decisions to be a REAL alternative to Windows or even Macintosh. IMO, this "move" that Apple made from OS 9 to OS X was the best thing they ever done! Plus, they made a whole vertical market for themselves with the iPod and of course the music side of the business really has paid off in spades.
The comparison I am trying to make, is I know people that refuse to give up OS 9 (some of them even refuse to give up MacOS 7 or
! Those folks are limited to the software they can use now because it is not officially supported. Heck I know of folks that are using Apple II series machines today and are in our boat!
My point here is simply, the Amiga Community is dedicated to the "retro" side of the AmigaOS. If we got a modern OS that we could use modern applications on (hopefully not from Microsoft), then a lot of us would still have our "retro" machines for the games,etc.. and if it became viable enough -- the new OS for our day to day work.
I guess I don't understand why A. Inc doesn't do what Apple did to speed up the process of development. If we agree (and I am not saying everyone here will) that to move forward we need a modern OS for the Amiga on modern hardware. If that is the baseline: A.Inc or subsequent owners of the rights need to build the OS. Apple did this by taking FreeBSD (a very solid and stable UNIX) and tweaking it to their liking and tweaking the Kernel... it is still pretty much BSD under the hood! Then they put their own GUI from the Graphics Engine on Up (Aqua) on top of it and presto! OS X! I had bugs sure, but it was only a year from announcement. Obviously, no one except Steve and Co there in Cupertino, CA know how long it took to do all the tweaking to the BSD Subsystem nor how long to develop the GUI front end either. But they saw that the MacOS was just getting outdated and knew that survival of the company meant modernizing.
I think we are there in the Amiga Platform as well. Aside from obvious copyright issues, there is no reason development on a modern Amiga OS could not begin exactly the same way. Build your functionality on top of a known solid system. IMO, that would not be Linux. BSD is an excellent choice because it is "rock solid".
Anyhow, all that has been written above is fully the opinion of myself and I would like to see what others think.
I use Macintosh because I hate Microsoft and yet as much as I like Open Office, no native port yet -- they are working on that of course though ;-) There are times I miss the old OS 9 Mac experience though, but most of the time, I am reminded why OS X is so much better when it does its little bomb thing!!!!
Moral of the story: When you choose what platform you will compute on, you must choose what "headaches" you wish to deal with. IMO -- the ones Windows makes are much larger than any *NIX system! Also, (a sub moral if you will) -- if the computer you are using does what you need it to do, why change to a different platform?
Sorry for such a long post, I am of course going to be studying Engineering at College starting next month -- Imagine that, A 35 (soon to be 36) year old computer veteran with over 20 years experience in the industry going back to school to finally get his BS in Computer and Electronics Engineering! This does tend to make me long winded because I also program :-)
