PearPC

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Which brings up another question: has anybody tried PPC OSes other than Linux and Mac OS on Mac-on-Linux?

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Well, I was under the impression that AmigaOS needed some sort of activation key which was stored in the AmigaOne ROM.  Either way, PearPC isn't going to entice people to use AmigaOS or MorphOS on a Wintel box.  At present, the performance on a high end Wintel would be comparable to a 60 MHz 601 (or a PowerMac 6100) -- according to the to the PearPC website.  The only real threat would be from something like Mac-on-Linux, which would only run on a PowerPC anyhow.

So ask yourself two questions on the piracy front: is piracy of legacy Amiga ROMs and OSes a problem?  I would venture that the answer is no, and I say that for a couple of reasons: there is a vocal oppositions against piracy in the Amiga community.  This is unlike other platforms which are comparably obsolete where people say piracy is bad, wink, wink.  It is also unlike slightly more obsolete platforms where piracy is the norm.  You also have a vendor who was good enough, or desparate enough, to license their ROMs and OSes for use in emulation.  Would something like PearPC or MOL change this.  It certainly wouldn't change the former, and selling their OS independent of hardware would be a continuation of the latter.

Would emulation or virtual machines be a burdern to the vendors or AmigaOS or MorphOS?  Any answer to that question would be pure spectulation, but my speculative answer would be yes.  My reasoning is simple: the people who are genuinely interested in using these operating systems are probably willing to pay the price for the hardware, and there are margins to be made off of hardware.

Would you loose potential, genuinely interested users?  Sure you would!  I'll use myself as an example: I'm tired of the status quo in operating systems.  They are slow and bloated, which doesn't fit my philosophy.  Would I be willing to dump serious money into an alternative?  I already do (I already run Apple hardware).  Am I willing to do so sight unseen?  Absolutely not.  It looks like an AmigaOne G4 would cost over $1000 Canadian.  If I don't like the OS, I would loose a considerable amount of money.  On the other hand, if it was a $200 OS I would be much more likely to buy it sight unseen.  I am desparate for something better than what I have after all.  Once I know that I like it, and am confident that I'll use it for a couple of years, maybe then I'll buy the hardware.  (Which I would consider to be a step backwards in portability and power consumption in the first place.)  Of course, a few odd ball users such as myself may not make the OS only route a smart option.  (I don't even believe that it would be a smart route for Apple.)

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Matt: I'm sorry to be blunt about this, but the Amiga is not going to recover.  There will be no recovery because very few people know that alternatives to those Intel driven beige boxes exist.  A few people have heard about Apple and Linux, but they don't know what they are or how to obtain them.  If Amiga has any brand recognition, it is historic.  Very few people know that there is an update OS on the other side of the event horizion.  Very few people know about the AmigaOS alikes, like AROS or MorphOS.  (Are there others which I should be aware of?)

Of course that doesn't mean that the Amiga is dead.  If people are willing to pay enough for it, it can hang on as some sort of fringe system.  That bit about paying enough for it is why I think selling the OS separate of the hardware is suicidal.  It would mean one less revenue source.  It also means that piracy is very unlikey.  Consider the sheer numbers of people who pirate Solaris, IRIX, AIX, and such.

The OS wars ended a long time ago.  Microsoft won, and everyone else lost.  No one is going to recover because there is too much money invested in Microsoft software (and Intel hardware).  The only way that is going to change is when a new technology replaces the PC.

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Please don't construe my words as support for Microsoft.  I don't like them.  I even refuse to use their products at home, where I make the decisions, and try to avoid it outside of the home, where the decisions of others are thrust upon me.  That said, I am a bit of a pessimist as far as the future of the industry is concerned.  I have long since realised that the only way I'm going to survive in the computer world is to be an island upon himself.  Fortunately, there are a few other islands out there to chat with. :-D

As for the impending threat of Linux, Microsoft is doing their best to head it off.  They will probably have much success.  The basic problem is recovering your data once it has been locked up by a particular vendor.  It turns out to be very costly, and the industry doesn't go through that type of shift very often.  None of this means that Linux can be destroyed.  Seeming as the system is out there with the source code, it will continue to adapt to new technologies for decades to come.  That is the heritage of Unix, which has survived and evolved for some 35 years now.  But survival is different from capturing a healthy chunk of the market.

But the question we should be asking ourselves is will the Amiga, or an Amiga clone survive?  Unix systems are nice, but I'm rather distressed that the only major surviving operating systems are based on some version of Unix.  Ignoring Windows, of course.  Who really cares about Windows.  ;-)

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If it isn't dead and isn't recovering, it just means that it is very ill.  Or perphaps the illness analogy is a bad one.  I'm simply saying that things aren't going to get much better.

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This sort of thing has been argued over in the Mac community a thousand times over (in the guise of Mac clone vendors and an x86 based Mac).

The argument reduces to this: it costs a lot to develop an operating system.  If you have a limited market, then you have to recoup the costs by charging a lot of money for the operating system.  But people don't want to pay serious sums of money for the operating system.  So how do they recoup the costs?  Well, they bundle it to hardware and make some of the money there.

Other people argue that the platform will gain an astounding amount of support if users didn't have to pay huge globs of money just to try it.  Well, it isn't necessarily so: Linux and several BSD variants are free and they can only gain a few percent of the user base.  Some may argue that they are hard to use.  Then what of BeOS, which tried a fee then free model.  It was pretty easy to use.  What of OS/2, which used a fee model?  OS/2 was Windows 95 done right (and done before Windows 95).  IBM had very little success.

Now chances are that the Amiga is going to loose me as a user because of the OS and hardware model, but that doesn't mean that their business decision is wrong.  It simply means that their business decision cannot satisfy everybody.