If Genesi owned the rights to Amiga IP

[Rogue]

mdma wrote:
Both AOS4 and MorphOS could be made to run on Apple, IBM, and the multitude of other PPC solutions if the developers wanted/had the time/financial inclination to do it.

More competition for hardware, more choice.

"Multitude"??

Barbie is canned, last thing I heard. Terrasoft is canned, last thing I heard. IBM? Let's be serious, did you check the price tag?

Pegasos: They didn't want it last time we asked.

[Rogue]

Seehund, I think I asked you before how you would handle customer support. Did you ever answer to that?

[Rogue]

The more people using the OS the better your bank balance is

That would highly depend on the effort required to bring the OS to a different hardware, and the amount of copies sold. x Million Apple users wouldn't mean x million additional sales. The question would be, how many Apple users would buy it? I'd venture to say very little. So the question is, how much would it cost in terms of development resources, and customer support (the often-neglected part) to bring AmigaOS to Apple hardware? These two factors need to be balanced against each other, and only if there is a plus coming out does this make sense.

Right now, I don't believe this.

Bill Gates is a very rich man because of this.

Sigh. Bill Gates didn't do it by himself. Windows relies on external developer works (mainly drivers, mainboard BIOSes etc). Doing an OS on a specific hardware is much easier if the company making the hardware also supports the product by providing the required drivers. You won't see Apple produce drivers for AmigaOS. So you have to do this all by yourself.

Another things I always keep saying (which is always ignored it seems) is customer support. We are talking about a commercial product, so everyone calling support will want to have exactly that - support. You can't just say "sorry, I don't know this hardware". Even if you narrow down the hardware by saying "does only run on x and y", you can be certain that someone with z will come along and complain that it doesn't work. What then? Saying "it's not supported" isn't going to make you friends.

For the same reason, we don't put "Amithlon" or "AmigaOSXL" on the "supported" stickers even of those games we release for 68k. We cannot support them, since we don't have enough knowledge about it. A certain person using a three-letter acronym involved in Amithlon always tried to convince me that there is no difference between Amithlon and a real Amiga, but that is simply not true (not spelling his name, I don't want to summon him :-) )

[Rogue]

Microsoft handles support how do they do it?

With a multi-millon dollar budget. Come on, this is ridiculous.

Linux(all the various distros) BeOS?

Linux? Support? Try getting a Matrox card to work on an ALI chipset mainboard with AGP. Where do you turn to when things don't work out? Where is the Linux support department?

BeOS? That company went bust, if you didn't notice it. Partly because they entagled themselves in an endless driver writing mess. Support? Yeah, sure.

Apple had clones how did it do it?

Again, with a multi-million dollar budget. And it's not like Apple is doing the hardware support all by themselves.

hey all somehow magically can do it...how come you cant?

Yeah, sure they magically work by money, or not at all.

as BBRV has said they plan to bring MorphOS to macs and they said MorphOS will run the Teron's w/o A1 changes made....

"Planing" is nice. I don't think it's done yet, though, or is it?

You completely twist the meaning of "support". I don't mean to actually get something to run on a hardware. I mean "customer support", like in "Parametric User calls support hotline" kind of support.

S: "This is Support, how may I help you"?

U: "Hi, I do have this apple computer, and my AmigaOS crashes".

S: "What kind of Apple computer do you have?"

U: "A Macintosh"

S: "I mean, what kind of Macintosh?"

U: "One of those strawberry colored things"

(competion left as an exercise to the reader)