Interview with Ben Hermans

[System]

@ MarkTime, Zacman and Mahem

(Is it really necessary to turn another positive AmigaOS thread into a "MorphOS is better" flamewar?)

AmigaOS3.9, AmigaXL and Amithlon could not have been developed without Amiga Inc's approval. They bought the Amiga IP from Gateway for 4.5 million USD. I believe no other company could or would have raised such kind of money to acquire Amiga's assets.

Also note that AmigaXL, Amithlon and MorphOS all host their Amiga(-like) environments on top of "alien" secondary kernels (QNX Neutrino, Linux and Quark). The approach Hyperion is taking us, is by greatly further enhancing the new Amiga ExecSG kernel.

Of course alot of technology could have been shared between MorphOS and AmigaOS4 (and  x86 emulators), for some code this is already the case. Sadly instead of walking a path of dialogue and tolerance, a path of "war" and confrontation was chosen. Any chance of cooperation is thus likely lost for the immediate future.

One thing is for sure, Amiga Inc will have to defend their IP, for which they paid millions.

Although MorphOS or a new Amithlon solution would be nice as well, I greatly prefer to have AmigaOS4. I am willing to patiently wait until a qualitly AmigaOS solution is finished. (Eat your hearts out  ;-) )

[System]

"All could have been the direction a new AmigaOS
could have taken. We could have done a QNX
based solution, with initially the os running in emulation but with native extensions.Amithlon
did the same thing with Linux, and many native
extensions were developed."

Yeah! lets all use EMU's yahoo! throw OS4.0 in the bin Hyperion! it's waste of time.

"Amiga, Inc. chose Hyperion's solution, of the four choices Amiga had--they chose the one solution that didn't ship. The other 3 shipped."

What?? are you saying that OS4.0 is trashed and it never will be shiped/deliverd/released/launched??!!!!

"Thats not just an unlucky coincidence. Hyperion didn't ship because its not their main business, they aren't particularly concerned when it ships, and they feel the market is captive."

Yeah, they just by a coincidence found them self porting games and now this!! porting OS, what the hell!!! it's CRAZY!!!

"I've thought about it..."
Whats that smell?

"yes I am glad they felt enough pressure to actually get down from their high horse long enough to speak....but thats not good enough."

This is getting really wierd, are the using horses in this day and time??? F*%up isn't it.

creative individuals?! Nah who needs them?

[System]

@ Zacman

Yes, and they have had the wrong management and "Boom.".  

I must have missed this "Boom". There is no denying that Amiga Inc has been weak with regard to PR in the past. But IMO there is still a good chance to make up for this.

There are competent people working for Amiga Inc and they have good intentions for making up for past mistakes.

And lost all. Too bad. Which Amiga company will be next?

They still own the Amiga IP, they still have good products under development and have formed solid partnerships. Of course Amiga Inc would have liked to do alot more in the past, provided they had the resources.

[System]

@ MarkTime

Heck, I've never seen MorphOS in my life....this isn't a morphOS is better thread.

My point is simply this, Hyperion hasn't done a good job by any measure I'm aware of...., they haven't even done the 'best we could hope for under the circumstances job'.

Interesting, so why do you bring up MorphOS as an example for why Hyperion has't done a good job, if you don't really know that much about this product?

 :-?

Another company could have done more, in less time, and there were many other companies hoping to do this job.

Look MarkTime, MorphOS has been under development for many years now and only recently did this project really take off, of course with the usage of large parts of AROS source code (which also has been under development for a very long time).

Just like with Amithlon, the Amiga Inc team was impressed when they first evaluated MorphOS. But no proper agreement could be reached. At the time a true AmigaOS port to a PPC platform looked a too immense task. But eventually H&P did see oppertunities, only to back out of this agreement some time later.

During the relative short time Hyperion has been managing the AmigaOS4 project, they have written a fully functional modern Exec PPC kernel, managed to get the entire AmigaOS4 team working together, created a BootROM and ported LinuxPPC for Mai, realised great partnerships (i.e. SciTech), released new Amiga and Mac games and have done their absolute best to keep the community up to date. These people are fantastic and AmigaOS4 will be the biggest update AmigaOS has ever seen! :-o

It doesn't mean bugs are being worked out, Hyperion has yet to guarantee a bug free product, nor will they.

With regard to larger hardware and software development projects there is no such thing as a guaranteed bug free product.

Its just they didn't have the resources to deliver the product in the time they promised.

And thats not a GOOD thing...its a bad thing.

But actually a *very* common thing within the tech industry. Their initial believes with regard to development times have been proven wrong mainly due to unforseen additional work (Mai contract work, additional desirable features, etc).

[System]

@ Downix

which then needs to be corrected (MorphOS was in beta long before last year).

The development process of MorphOS cannot be well compared to the AmigaOS4 development process. With MorphOS there was a more usual development process, where first the fundamental parts were finished and then over a large period of time component after component were being developed and added.

With regard to AmigaOS4 all the components were being worked on almost simultaniously, so i.e. AmiDock's main development process may well have been largely finished before PPCBoot or ExecSG.

The need to correct inaccurate information should not be labeled as a "flamewar" unless you are attempting to insight one yourself. and I know you don't do that, do you Mike?

I saw that MorphOS was being brought up within this AmigaOS4 thread, and history learns us that this generally results into childish flamewars. So I thought I should *try* to exstinguish the little sparks before they turn into flames.  :-)