"Driver team" for os4?

[billt]

>  They could get a % share of the hardware sold, which they created a driver for

Interesting idea, but ti don't work that way unfortunately. ATI doesn't want ANY expense involved with AmigaOS drivers for Radeons. Not a single penny. The market is way too small for them to care. They ain't going to be giving any money whatsoever to Forefront or anyone else writing alternative OS drivers. If AmigaOS coders want paid, they have to charge AmigaOS users... We're lucky some of these hardware companies would even consider sharing their documentation, even if it might be very old and buggy at times, rather than everyone doing like NVidia does, who did not even have the courtesy to write back and say "thank you for your interest but no".

[billt]

> I seem to recall someone (maybe here, maybe at Amigaworld.net) saying "They're testing the CD for release
> now!" about two or three months ago. I just can't get my head around why it could possibly take that damned long to
> release the thing.

Have you ever developed any serious software project before as part of a development team? Sometimes bugs sneak up on you and take longer than a day or two to track down and fix. Sometimes this can be a real pain due to vague, inaccurate, or total lack of documentation for something involved with the problem. If this happens with a bug big enough that makes something unpleasant to use (even if actually functional, just unpleasant/buggy), it doesn't make sense to send out even a prerelease that isn't ready. Once the few big things are taken care of, then it's more realistic to share with non-developers. For example, Radeon users really wouldn't have liked the prerelease as it was a month ago, now they should be reasonably happy. It worked a month ago, even a number of months ago, but wouldn't have been very agreeable for most users until now on AmigaOne.