Consequences of the AmigaOS 3.1 source code "leak", one year after?

[Matt_H]

It's also possible that AmigaBASIC was discontinued (I recall Dr. Peter Kittel mentioning that there was a version which ran fine on the Amiga 3000 and worked correctly with Kickstart/Workbench 2.0) because the need for a home computer to ship with BASIC was no longer a given. It certainly was about a decade ago.

The Software Upgrade manual that shipped with 2.04 (and 2.1?) mentions that Amiga Basic has been removed from the OS but that it's available separately. I don't think the standalone Basic ever made it to commercial release, but if it was in development internally until 1991 then what he's saying about 2.0 and 32bit compatibility makes sense.

[Matt_H]

CBM had a professional developer program, called CATS. Unfortunately, it costed money to join, and no, I never joined. I just bought the books (RKRMs, AmigaDos manual) and did some reasearch of my own.

...

Customer relations costs money, and CBM was always short of money. Instead, ask developers to *pay* for your platform. I as a hobby developer did not buy into this type of marketing.

Exploring this subject a bit, I'd argue that Commodore's approach to third-party development was much nicer than what Apple and other walled-garden vendors are offering these days.

With Commodore, my take on it is that, essentially, if you could get a functional product you could distribute it as you see fit. If you needed to distribute it with OS components (e.g., 1.3-era products that included Workbench on the program disk) you paid a license. And if you bought into CATS you got phone/email support from a real human, access to various software betas, and a line directly into the development office for the platform. Not being a developer myself I don't have first hand knowledge of this, but from what I've read over the years, registered developers formed mutually beneficial working relationships with their CATS reps and were very happy with the service. And CATS was justifiably proud of the service the provided.

Nowadays, with Apple and co., everything is "free" but the vendor controls your distribution channels. They take a cut of your profits and they can lock you out entirely for some perceived slight against them. I can hardly imagine an iOS developer having a productive conversation with someone inside Apple, let alone Apple taking the development community's concerns seriously or inviting them to suggest product improvements.

With the size and scale of software development in the larger industry today, I don't know whether something like CATS would be logistically possible for a modern vendor, but I think that CATS was a very important option to have available back in the day, and that it's a big part of why the Amiga has survived as long as it has.