samface wrote:
However, *maybe* taking a look at the Mac Linux kernel sources could be of help
The trouble with reverse engineering is that you never catch the subtleties until you actually try.
What the Seehund and others faction always overlook (and of course refuse to see even if you wave it in their face) is Customer Support. I don't see the Apple support department answer to Mac customer queries about OS 4. That would mean that someone else would need to take care of that (and I can vividly imagine on what desk it would land).
With a licencing scheme, it will be guaranteed that part of the support (at least the hardware specific stuff) is handled by the hardware company/licence holder. This is the only way that such a thing could be managed.
What really makes me furious (I was about to say is
me off, but I don't want to resort to such language) is the fact that regardless of how often I stress this point, I see the same arguments over and over again. No one even acknowledges that this is a problem. For crying out loud, you can't tell a customer that bought your product that his hardware platform is unsupported, or that we expect trouble because we didn't have documentatiion.
The "Go Mac" argument is always brought up by those people that think that this is the only way to go mainstream, or reach an adequate circulation, but this is exactly the problem - you can't tell Mr. ex-MacOS user "sorry, but we cannot help you if your harddisk driver is constantly crashing". That just doesn't work. People that contact customers support want an answer, not an explanation why things can't be changed.
Of course, everyone will continue to ignore this point, just pointing at "Apples are so cheap when you buy them used". People will go on about how they never contact customer support because they are the Über-Geeks that can do everything all by themselves.
But that is not how customer support works. For the same reason Hyperion doesn't officially support Amithlon and AmigaOS XL with our 68k based games - you cannot honestly sell something when you need to tell the customer "I can't help you" when problems hit.
Sigh. Posting this was probably a waste of time. Seehund will probably jump at the next opportunity to promote his free AmigaOS 4 stuff again.
