Hi Ian, before it might have made since. Now it does not. We do not need OS4 or any of the trademarks. We have our own "brand" now. We want to promote this and this is our #1 focus. For your information, the last serious conversation (if you can call it that) we had with Bill McEwen was in June 2001. Bill wanted $20/unit license fee and a $100,000 up front payment, plus a dongle and we had to do all the work! We said forget it and the rest is history. We spoke briefly to Fleecy again face to face in London in April 2002. At this point we understood the effort to combine the efforts was totally futile. We decided to eliminate any cross-pollenation whatsoever. We did.
In the meanwhile, we legally purchased a few hundred copies of OS 3.9 which if we wanted to we could bundle with the Pegasos -- just to put an Amiga label on the package. Alternatively, we could have made a deal with Cloanto...this would have done the job too. In the end, we decided against both approaches.
When OS4 is done we can analyse the situation then, but our inclination is that we do not have the time to do this. Hyperion can do it if they want to. They will need an installed base of users to sell their product. The Pegasos "Community" could be a potential market for them.
For us, OS4 is no different than any flavor of Linux, BeOS or BSD. To tell you the truth, NewOS is the most interesting of all of them. Anyway, we will support Hyperion when they are ready. The people that made what they are using now are part of Genesi, so eventually it would not surprise us if everyone is happy and gets along someday...
As to the other questions...the Q-Box is a long term development (years), but that will not stop someone from partitioning their hard drive and running multiple operating systems. There are options already. Some JIT works now and the Pegasos will do more things as time goes on. Any good OS is "alive." There is never a final product -- just evolution and hopefully improvement.
Hope that answers your question.
Sincerely,
Raquel and Bill
