Terrasoft shelves MAI Logic motherboards

[Seehund]

Let's just say that Seehund might find out that Hyperion/Amiga/Eyetech are not the only ones wanting to charge money for the privilege of running an operating system.

Well duh! Is this Obvious Day?

The problem is not wanting to be payed for the software one sells. I thought everyone agreed on this much at least. The problem is IMO how one expects to sell as many copies of the software as possible, and inventing an "Amiga hardware" market for third party hardware that has nothing to do with the company|ies publishing/making AmigaOS, and making sales of AmigaOS dependent on such a thing, and that unlike Windows, AmigaOS is not a commercially attractive enough OS for hardware vendors to even consider getting a license - with all the prerequisites there are for that - only to be "allowed" to compete on such a miniscule, restricted and saturated "market".

At least we only want to charge A1 users and our OS is proprietary and developed by ourselves.

(It would of course be better if you only wanted to charge AmigaOS users regardless of whom they buy their hardware from, but I think I've said that before... )
So why did you write that? Does TSS want to charge YDL users of other hardware than Teron boards, or what?


Field day? Yeah, you'll hear an I-told-you-so or two but Schadenfreude (that word is used in English too, right?) isn't my cup of tea, at least not when it would be because of bad things happening to something I wish to be successful - AmigaOS.

[Seehund]

HyperionMP:

TSS is a VAR/distributor for the Teron boards, right?
TSS sells the Teron boards including a pre-installed, retail version of the supported YDL distro, right?
TSS charges for these bundled copies, just as they charge for separately sold copies of the distro, right?

What do you mean with "charging through the producer of the boards"? "Capable of running it"? Surely you mean every board shipped with the supported retail YDL distro?

That sounds like Mai, not TSS alone, has decided for YDL as the default distro to be sold with all Teron boards (instead of like before TurboLinux or whatever it was from the beginning), and if these  are retail copies supported by TSS (i.e. equal to if you bought a copy of YDL, not downloaded the "unsupported" ISOs). TSS can't force anyone to ship the "commercial" YDL distro with any hardware on their own. Mai could just as well have decided to ship the boards with YDL (or any other distro) for free and unsupported by TSS. I see no "bad guy" tendencies on TSS' part (nor on Hyperion's part, for that matter).

[Seehund]

> Who/what is Seehund?

The Pinnipaedia family and a mini-submarine.

[Seehund]

> Only people who specifically want AmigaOS will need to pay for it.

The bummer for AmigaOS's and prospective users' sake is that only people who already own an Amiga and a PPC board or people interested in a simultaneous purchase of a Teron board sold only via Eyetech can pay for it...

[Seehund]

No, I mean EVERY BOARD capable of running it including the A1 and regardless of whether or not they are actually shipping with YDL or not.

So, was I right in assuming that Mai and TSS have an agreement to make YDL the "default distro" of the Teron boards? That would be like Hyperion and Mai have an agreement to make the open source U-Boot with your modifications the default Teron firmware for which you (hopefully) get payed by Mai (i.e. a cost included in the producer's hardware price) regardless of whether some distributor decides to ship their boards pre-flashed with another firmware.

In what instances are you saying that the boards would not be shipped with YDL (if the assumption above is correct) yet have it included in the price? Wouldn't that require the decision of a distributor (other than TSS - i.e. currently Mai themselves, Inguard, and Eyetech AFAIK) to not supply their end-customers with YDL, which the distributors have already payed for? I can't find what distro Eyetech plans to ship (they keep referring to "LinuxPPC" which is an ancient distro, but I assume they simply mean "some PPC Linux distro").

I have a hard time being upset about this, really. Mai, like e.g. Apple and Genesi, would apparently have decided to include one particular OS in the price of their own hardware. So the Terons would have become more like "YDL hardware" so to speak, instead of "Turbo Linux hardware" or whatever they shipped with before regardless of what the individual end-users wanted to use. Big deal.

Call it a "Linux tax" if you like.

It doesn't seem to be as much of a TSS/YDL "Linux tax" (c.f. "Microsoft tax") as it would be a "Teron tax". In the Microsoft tax case it's the software vendor controlling the hardware vendors (through Windows' market domination and its commercial appeal/necessity), but in this case TSS can't control Mai in the same way (Mai and the Terons aren't dependent on YDL). Instead of making this arrangement, Mai could just as well have gone with e.g. Debian or even shipped the free "unsupported" YDL with their boards,  or Mai themselves or someone else could've modified and supported YDL, without Mai becoming a commercial paria - imagine Dell losing their ship-with-Windows-OEM license! No extortion here AFAICS. The wonders of the GPL.

I'm also an YDL user, and as long as TSS doesn't try to tell me who I'm allowed to buy my hardware from I'm happy with that distro, and looking forward to 3.0...

[Seehund]

> see here for a very good reason as to the delays.

It's already common knowledge that the firmware wasn't ready, in spite of what's been announced by others than TSS and Mai. There are no actual delays per se. The boards are simply not done and shipping in volume yet, again despite what's been announced by others than TSS and Mai. The quite natural "breaking" of totally unrealistic and unfounded "release dates" announced by a distributor without any control over the product does not equal delays. It's a natural process. (There was a recent thread about "spoiling" here and on Moo Bunny)

[Seehund]

I think you don't fully understand.

Are you saying that you are okay with the fact that EVERY AmigaOne owner including those who have zero intrest in YDL would be required to pay extra on the off chance he may want to run YDL one day?

It does indeed seem like I don't fully understand exactly what you're trying to say... Exactly what is the situation here? When you say "every Teron capable of running YDL" (i.e. every Teron, regardless of distributor) includes the price for a full supported copy of YDL, then Mai must have chosen YDL as "the Teron distro", no matter if a distributor down the chain decides against including YDL for that distributor's customers, right? This is nothing that TSS can have introduced on "their own" and enforce on every distributor. Mai can't have been coerced by TSS, market pressure or anything else to do this.

That, or that TSS have bought the exclusive rights to produce Terons from Mai, can really be the only logical explanation.

No, I don't think it's ideal, the best thing would obviously have been options for which OS/distro you want to have bundled, if any. But I don't see why I should start seeing "bad guys" here. The Terons were always "Linux boards" to a certain extent, and now the hardware manufacturer has chosen (again, if you please could clarify on that bit) another "standard" distro than the previous Turbo Linux to ship with their boards.  If each board used to be sold with the right to a full copy of Turbo Linux, included or not by distributors, then there already was a "Linux tax".

Compared to the market control of third party hardware vendors allowed to sell hardware to AmigaOS users, this is nothing. IMO, there surely are worse things to be upset about for AmigaOS users than having to pay max $30 extra for a motherboard and an OS you might not be interested in ($30 is  the lowest price for retail YDL copies, I imagine OEM prices being far lower. Do you have any precise figures? TSS listed the Teron PX at $500, including YDL and with a "flexibility margin" of +/- $50 ). With no more Amiga hardware being made, we (users, you, Eyetech, AInc) don't really have much say in the matter of hardware anyway.