Seehund:
You suffer from a number of misconceptions here. The major one being that this announcement is the actuall licensing agreement. I dont mean to ridicule you but you must have realised this is not a contract posted to the net. It's an announcement to the public and eliminates a number of the finer legal points for simplicitys sake.
>Exactly. That's not "just", that's a software company trying to tell hardware distributors and users what to do. Amiga Inc. do not have the weight to throw around to do such a thing successfully. It's an unnecessary obstacle without technological relevance against having AmigaOS running on as many hardware products as possible available from as many distributors as possible.
>Well, of course not! The point is that nobody should have to license and use this name to begin with in order to sell their own hardware, regardless of what OS the buyers are using. If someone wants to use the Amiga trademark or sell OS/hardware bundles they should of course have to get a license, but not just to sell their hardware, regardless if their customer uses OS X, Y or Z. Please read the petition before you decide to sign it or not.
You sound as if Amiga is declaring that all manufacturers of POP based boards around the planet need to sell AmigaOS or they can't make hardware at all. Firstly, Amiga isn't telling any hardware company or the users what to do. They are only requireing a hardware based dongle to be present on any hardware sold with the Amiga in mind. This is not about technical relevence but solely for the purpose of eliminating priacy of the OS and its something i agree with 100%. Take Eyetech as an example. The Eyetech motherboard can be sold without the rom dongle as a PPC linux machine. If you buy a board from them to run AmigaOS you get the OS packed up with the board. The OS bundle of course will add maybe $50-$100. Worth every penny to me but if you choose not to run AmigaOS on your Eyetech board they wont charge you for it and you wont be forced to have it. Amiga DOES NOT require that the OEM sell the OS with every product the OEM manufactures, only with Amiga based motherboards. There is still as much of a choice as ever. Any other OEM making a POP based board would loose the Amiga market by not supporting the anti-piracy measures and good riddance to them.
>Please STOP thinking about only two pieces of hardware called Pegasos and AmigaOne.
Good point, but then i'm not thinking of that either.
>If there was no compulsory licensing, no compulsory BIOS modifications, and no compulsory OS/hardware bundling, you could choose unrestricted between these two and whatever other POP mobos there are and might be.
There would also be rampant piracy of the OS.
>Before someone comes along and says "but AOS must still be compatible with the hardware...", yes of course. But if a hardware distributor must modify potentially compatible hardware, get a license and start selling OS4, then the chances that OS4 will ever run on that hardware are drastically reduced before any compatibility work can even be planned for OS4.
The form of the dongle doesnt have to be a bios extension. The dongle itself can take many forms. ROM, USB, etc. Hyperion have stated before that the bios extension to the Eyetech motherboard was chosen by all parties as the best possible method to make that board an Amiga board. Other manufactuers will undoubtedly choose other soultions and with no need to redesign thier motherboards to gain AmigaOS support for thier hardware. bPlan for example could go with a USB based dongle. IBM (yeah keep dreaming) could design a board and go with yet another hardware solution. There are no restrictions other than there must be something on or with the hardware to keep the OS from being spread illegaly. The additional costs will only be for the Amiga based systems and the only people who will be charged for the protection are the users who buy AmigaOS and nobody else. I don't mind a bit and i won't sign your petition.
Ivan
