Hey again Seehund
We seem to agree on a number of areas. Off hand i'd say,
1) We both like the licensing of HW. It's like a boingball sticker on the box saying buy this one it's what we had in mind when making the Amiga.
2) We think competition between hardware vendors is a good thing. Pushes out better quality and quicker release of designs.
3) We think there should be more hardware vendors pushing out Amiga boxes. (this should probably be #1 eh?)
4) Amiga needs to protect its OS from pirates.
5) Amiga Inc needs to hire a PR man. A web designer for that matter as well. Hell i'll do it myself if they'd let me. And for free.
But, we do disagree too.
>Precisely. There's no incentive for distributors to become Amiga licensees, and becoming an Amiga licensee is the only way they'll be able to offer their products to the Amiga market as well as their other markets. We, the Amiga OS users lose. The hardware market that's interesting for us loses competition.
There is incentive for them. Selling thier PPC systems to the Amiga market plain and simple. 1 more sale is 1 more sold box period. And it's free to that OEM to make that sale.
>not to lock out any other customers and the non-licensed market.
I don't see anyone being locked out. Even bPlan was offered a license by Amiga and we all know they never sent Amiga a dev board.
You want the OS sold seperatly, where I don't find it an inconveniance but a reasurance that the HW and SW will live up to expectations.
>I want to buy my hardware from the ones who sell me the best hardware at the lowest price. If they don't give me that I don't care if they're an "Amiga" company or if they're licensed.
Sure this would be great. I like discounts too. In fact, i've been known to clip a coupon or two.
BUT, what hardware companys??? Where are you getting these PPC systems from? I want one too.
MAC? They sure as heck don't want AmigaOS on thier systems. They produce thier own OS and are as closed as can be.
bPlan? They want to sell linux boxes and use MorphOS's copy of AmigaOS 3.x too suck in a few Amiga people. If this wasen't the truth they would have sent a board to Hyperion and let the system be sold to Amiga users with a real AmigaOS running on it. Not some frankenstein hacked up kludge fakeing AOS3.1. The truth is, bPlan views the Amiga market as a place where they can meddle around and stir up the piss to make a few sales without haveing to do much more than spout a few promises. (sorry for my french)
Ok, i'd love it if Gateway had a PPC machine. Name anyone and i want them pushing a PPC solution. Give me a mass market. How do we do that? The problem is the big OEM's are so damn busy competeing over a single platform that they can't afford to switch over to marketing a PPC system too. They have spent thier lives building the wintel market and cant see anything else. The liscening agreement and distribution scheme wether good or bad is not even a concern to them. If it means one million boxes sold they would hire a dozen clowns to stand on thier heads and scream "Amiga Rulez The World" 'till thier ears bleed.
But who is producing all this PPC HW you want to choose from? It just dosen't exist. So the packaging of the OS with the HW is NOT a problem to anyone but a pirate. But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that IBM created a PPC system that was zico compliant (if zico is even the standard anymore), but they didn't want to bundle the OS because of bad memorys of M$'s business practices. Don't you think if IBM approached Amiga that Amiga wouldn't bend over backwards to ship an OS solution for the hardware being offered them? Damn right they would. The fact that today all we can do is buy the OS packed up with hardware we wan't anyway OR buy the OS for hardware we already own is not a limitation to the markets growth.
So let's say i buy the AmigaOne from Eyetech and 6 months later a miracle happens and a company called lets say, Hewlett Packard Dell announces the dream machine. A G7 with more bells and whistles than you ever heard of and it's selling for $50! ( this is obviously hypothetical
) What is to stop me from taking my AmigaOS CD over to the Hewlett Packard Dell machine and running the OS there? The bios, ok let's pop that out and stuff it in the new system, ok good, the OS is runing on my dream machine now. Excellent (Mr. Burns voice). But wait, it wont run on my old Eyetech system because i yanked the bios. So what do i do now, buy the OS with every system i want to run it on or bitch and moan on public boards that this is killing the market because im too cheap to buy it. You know, i really don't see a problem with bundleing an OS with the hardware so long as it's provided as an option the way Amiga is doing it. Amiga will do all they can to promote sales of thier OS and get in the way of piracy. They sure as heck won't slit thier own throat by making it easy for the pirate nor will they stifle competition on the HW scene by scareing off possible vendors with a license that's just too damn expensive to sign.
But just to be fair. If the OS was sold seperate and i had to slip in the bios chip myself, i wouldn't mind either. It's just one small step i have to take to get an Amiga. And secondly, haveing more than one avenue to purchase the OS i wan't will also allow for more competition. But do be fair to me and admit it's an inconveniance i shouldn't have to deal with and that it really gets up the pirates arse.
This seems to come off a little hardlined.. I'm too tired to re-edit it all. Sorry if i burned you Seehund, or anyone else. Except the pirates of course.
Ivan.
