"acquired the tangible and intangible assets of the Amiga business"...
Every company that buys Amiga seems to aspire to be what Commodore was. Latching onto some great technology, guarding it closely, trumping it up with pomp and bluster, delivering too little constantly to the market and telling the fans that they're lucky the company did that for them. &*%@ that. Commodore sucked and is nothing to aspire to. I fully realize no one is going to get a fat wad of investment money without being in the mindset of monopolizing and guarding the infamous "intellectual property", but, please, stop acting surprised that the people you're hoping to some day sell to are happy about the arrangement.
Again, fully aware that investment money would never support this, but there are a hell of a lot of talented developers with roots in the Amiga running around today, and their energies are divided; some are working on OS reimplementations, other on portable hardware emulators, and one guy recently went public with a gate array re-implementation of most of the A500 hardware. Efforts are divided to insane levels. The vast majority of people that want to do something with or for the Amiga are shut out and forced into being competition, forced to fragment the market beyond just fragmenting efforts. Any "value" still in Amiga isn't in the intellectual property but in the spirit of the people of cut their teeth on the thing. That's your asset.
Let's have a little thought experiment here. What if, rather than hiding behind your curtain working on a product that will be a real contender in a wide array of markets, you worked with the community on everything that's already out there, and came to market, doing us a favor by helping sell those things?
Someone was working on a Dragaonball (200+ mhz 68000) accelerator card. Let's say that gone done. Let's say you worked with the guy re-implemented the chipset in PGA logic. You now have a whole system you can market, without any tedious porting to PPC or creating emulation layers -- maybe that stuff happens later, but no one is waiting for it. Again, you're selling what exists now, to people who are extremely interested in this kind of stuff. Package the thing with 16 megs of video RAM and a stock ATI card with retargetable graphics and you'll have an Amiga that can spit out great resolution -- it won't be faster than anything on the market, but it'll be a killer Amiga.
Looking at all of this from the perspective of what your company could be expected to do and what they're trying to do, all of these days and political run-ins are expected and forgivable; looking at it from the perspective of what little it would take to please the community -- new hardware, semi-frequent OS releases without anything revoluation, like OS 3.9 -- and what the community itself is capable of, your lack of tangible product is inexcusable and unforgivable.
You keep saying that the whole matter could be solved if only they'd work with you. Hypocrite. There are people more passionate about Amiga than you. *This* whole problem could be resolved instantly if you would just work with them.
-scott
