Has an OS ever survived the loss of its parent company?

[MarkTime]

As some of you know, I struggle to put things in a concise way, only eventually succeeding after rambling on about it for ages....

but here is another idea proposed by members of the community, that Amiga OS can survive the loss of Amiga, Inc.

I am duly pondering this...and as a general rule, I always say, is there any precedent for this?

Of course new things happen sometimes, but I find a person should first examine history, and learn from it...as a general rule.

Well, two examples come to my mind.  Strangely, TOS, the infamous OS of former arch-rival Atari, and a more recent example BeOS.

Both 'survived' the loss of the parent company.  TOS was licensed to a few german companies, and one of them Milan, eventually produced a clone.  And of course, there were other clones, like the Medusa, which ran a version of TOS.

Then there is Be, Inc. And the recent news about yellowtab, and we see, that a new commercial version is set to be released, and we have the OpenBEOS movement...for that matter, on the Atari side, some TOS clones and open versions of desktop replacements too.

But, despite the technical survivial of those OS's....they all but disappeared from the landscape and to have any further impact on the computing industry...another way of looking at it, is they most definately did not survive the loss of the parent company, in terms of influence, in terms of ever turning the tide on a shrinking marketplace and user base.

Will things be different for Hyperion?  Not sure...

I doubt it, the appeal of Amiga OS 4, is still the legacy as a direct descendent of the name and ip...even if its a different direction of Commodore, its still the product of mother Amiga.

[that_punk_guy]

Last I heard, Hyperion were okay financially. So I don't think that's really a worry. If by 'parent company' you meant Amiga, Inc., well there's a certain amount of people in this community who would probably be more interested in Hyperion's OS4 if Amiga, Inc. was dead and gone.

Depends how you define 'survive', doesn't it? I mean you can still use CP/M if you like, so in that respect CP/M has never died :-D. I seriously doubt OS4 will go on to much commercial success though. There was a thread about that whole issue a few days ago.

[bhyman1]

I for one would love to see an Open Source OS for the Amiga that will run existing software but isn't dependent on the old technology, software wise.

I think if there was a larger installed base of Amigas this would have already happened successfully.

[that_punk_guy]

bhyman1 wrote:
I for one would love to see an Open Source OS for the Amiga that will run existing software but isn't dependent on the old technology, software wise.

Like AROS?  :-)

[MarkTime]

punk_guy,

I think that Amiga, Inc. is the parent company of Amiga OS.

I'm not blind to the situation in the community, and that people sometimes referred to as 'red' campers or whatever, actually have the majority of their respect with Hyperion.

But I think its Amiga, Inc. that the outside world understands, not Hyperion.  An Hyperion OS, wouldn't fare much better, maybe worse, than a MorphOS.

Yes, its all about words...on some level, of course Amiga OS will survive.

But if survival means, renewed interest, an expanding userbase...well that's a tall order, and I'm not sure it will happen if Amiga, Inc. goes under.

I think they have to do the impossible, Amiga, Inc. needs to survive and survive by selling OS 4.  I don't see a post-Amiga, Inc. world with Hyperion moving the platform forward...

it's not about their intent, skill, or even financial position (well unless they have half a billion of financial position)...its about being the heir apparant to the amiga legacy, and hyperion isn't that.

I think this was further underscored by the Dave Haynie interview and his own emotional connection to OS 4.

Well, ya...I know its probably been talked about before...but I have a new logo, so I have to make  few posts :-)

[T_Bone]

Amiga has survived many parent companies dissapearance.

[Linchpin]

Agreed :-)

[Paul_Gadd]

Amiga has survived many parent companies dissapearance.

Yeah and each one is worse than the last one,

Amiga Inc is the worst and a new company will need to do a lot of scamming to match Amiga Incs high standards.

[KennyR]

Paul_Gadd wrote:
Amiga Inc is the worst and a new company will need to do a lot of scamming to match Amiga Incs high standards.

Microsoft, AOL, nVidia or NTL could manage that, I reckon.

[Linchpin]

Hahahahahaha!

[SHADES]

Tell you what. I love AMIGA OS. The fact that they are trying to resurect such an OS just wow's me in ways I can't even understand myself.
There is no better OS for me. It just lacks some functionality like multi user.
The way it's set out and functions is so clean and nice I LOVE having standards!! Comon librarys that are stored in libs directory that programmers agree on and impliment, standards like AHI etc... try doing that in Win.  Linux is ok but not nearly as nice as AO.

 I remember seeing a tape on computers in the 80s and they debated weather there was "room" for another computer. They had Apple and IBM, Mac and now suddenly AMIGA and ATARI. The "experts" said no. There is no room.

Well the way I see and saw it is that there's plenty of stupid room, just as long as people want to buy it, it will continue.
Both computers did well, as you know, all the corruption and bad marketing and behind the scene involvement from bigger boys who got scared at loosing that space, interviened and caused the downfall of our favourite platform.

I will buy AMIGA OS, even though I can't afford the A1 at the moment.  I want AMIGA OS to continue.  If it dies again, I hope that it goes open source and has a feeverent take up like linux did.
I hope it remains the way it is for the moment, I like that fact that AMIGAs are being made again. Yep it's a shame about Be and whoever else, but this, AMIGA OS is the platform I want to use, as long as there is another person out there who also want's this platform to be their choice, and they know someone who also feels the same.................

Yep, there's enough room.

[Linchpin]

I agree. I want to see AOS dominate the market once again. The key is being one step ahead of the rest, something amiga has always exceled at, untill the "death" 10 years ago. The problem i see is that the A1, as amazing as it looks, dosent have the "numbers" needed to pull the newbies in. I know as well as you know that PPC is superior to Pentium, PC processors, but do the people know this? Take this for example.

1. 2400 mhz PC, with this,that,scanner,monitor = £899!

2. AmigaONE 800mhz, tower. £699. (or whatever)

Sigh...

What do you think the people will go for? I think i know.

Anyway, Back on subject :-)

Hopefully there are enough amigans left to carry the dream on :-)

Kevin

ps Wasnt that COMPLETLEY off topic? wow!
What a load of babbleon!

[fatman2021]

If Amiga Inc. dies, I will do everything I can to get Hyperion to GPL AmigaOS....

[Cymric]

_LinchpiN_ wrote:
... The problem i see is that the A1, as amazing as it looks, dosent have the "numbers" needed to pull the newbies in. I know as well as you know that PPC is superior to Pentium, PC processors, but do the people know this? Take this for example.

1. 2400 mhz PC, with this,that,scanner,monitor = £899!

2. AmigaONE 800mhz, tower. £699. (or whatever)

Whenever I see a message like this I begin to wonder. A PPC may be superior in technology, but if the competition has many, many more MHz's to make up for the deficiency, who cares? Certainly not the budding home user who wants to use his computer to write a few letters, access the Internet for email, play the occasional game, and organise his hobby projects.

I consider myself somewhat knowledgable on computers. I know how an Amiga works, I know how a PC works (though not as completely as the Amiga), I can hack into programs with a disassembler on both the i386 and m68k platforms, I am reasonably fluent with C. My interests are in language and compiler design, (automated) game core mechanics, network programming, and 3D libraries. I don't care one iota what CPU my programs run on---the underlying aspects of said interests are not dependent on it. As long as it compiles C and executes them reasonably fast, I'm happy.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: the days where it mattered what CPU you used are long gone. Efficiency of the compiler and scope of application libraries are far more important. And if you can do it on a PPC (with AmigaOS 4), you can do it equally well and most likely better on a run-of-the-mill Intel Pentium 4. The only thing an A1 as going for it is that it is a new platform, so people can agree on a common set of simple, extendable but above all consistent interfaces, both to the user as well as the programmer. This is much more attractive than something which serves as a battleground for various zealots. (Linux with its hopelessly divided KDE/Gnome UIs comes to mind.) That should be the goal of the A1 (and AmigaOS 4), not whether it runs on a PPC or not.

My $0.02.

[JetFireDX]

Couldn't agree with you more Cymric.