Amiga, Inc: Close That Open Hardware!

[Korodny]

@Seehund

Can you imagine Ben Hermans facial expression if you would have asked him 15 months ago to develop OS4 as a "secondary" OS for Apple and Pegasos customers? I can. Hyperion's most important condition was that somebody provides a dedicated hardware platform for their OS.

Escena had left a few months earlier and the Pegasos runs MOS. Eyetech was the only candidate left, and as they don't have the neccessary engineering skills or the money to fund an external development team, they had to adopt an existing design - the TeronCX/PX.

Despite the fact that they're using a finished motherboard design, Eyetech have pumped serious amounts of money into the A1-G3/XE. But now other companies (Terrasoft) will be selling the very same motherboards (this was planned from the beginning) at a lower price, as they don't have to pay licensing fees to Amiga Inc. Would you buy an Eyetech AmigaOne if you could get the same motherboard from Terrasoft - at a lower price? I know I wouldn't.

The licensing scheme (amongst other things) protects Eyetech's investments into the AmigaOne. Without such a protection, Eyetech wouldn't have started the project at all (IMHO). Without the A1, there wouldn't be OS4.

[Korodny]

@Seehund:

Ah, but there is no dedicated hardware platform for AmigaOS. The Teron boards are not dedicated to any OS. A mobo will run any OS that's compatible with it. For the Teron boards that has predominantly been Linux.

You didn't understand what I was trying to say. "Dedicated hardware" = hardware who's primarily sold to customers that want to run AmigaOS4 (see below).

No, Eyetech has never been a sole alternative since the Escena A1-1200/4000 projects failed. They're "just" another computer shop and distributor. The Teron boards have never been dependent on Eyetech.

I never said the AmigaOne hardware is something special. The special thing about the AmigaOne is that Eyetech targets AmigaOS customers. They're gonna do support for the Teron/OS4 combination, they'll bundle OS4 with their hardware and they guarantee to favour AmigaOS4 over any other OS (unlike Genesi or Apple for example) For crying out loud, they're marketing it as "the Amiga" (and they're even willing to let Amiga Inc. act is if it was their own product).

Please read my lips: That's what Hyperion demanded. They wouldn't have done OS4 otherwise.

You didn't name any other candidates that could have met these requirements - let alone were interested in doing so?

The current dependency on Eyetech is an artificial invention, which has arisen from a licensing deal.

No. It has arisen from Hyperion's condition that somebody must provide a dedicated hardware platform for OS4 - see Rogue's posting.

Precisely. There's no reason to why a user of AmigaOS should be treated as a retard compared to if he was running e.g. Linux.

I just gave you a reason. Terrasoft is not interested in AmigaOS (at least not as much as Eyetech).

If a customer prefers one vendor (for whatever reason; price, support, geographic proximity, ugliness of the logo, whatever) over another for the EXACT SAME product, he should naturally be allowed to choose that vendor for his purchase.

This is healthy and desperately needed competition.

"grotesque", "desperately needed competition", "OS4 customers treated as retards"? Please stop talking in buzzwords and show me a viable alternative. How could Hyperion's demand for a dedicated hardware platform have been fullfilled without the licensing scheme?

By the way, even before Terra Soft became a Mai VAR/distributor (which of course has been anticipated since the first hints that they were testing YDL on the boards), Mai sold the boards themselves, cheaper than Eyetech.

What has that got to do with the topic we're discussing?

Nonsense. The very existence and the development and sales of Teron boards have never been dependent on Eyetech. That's a ludicrous notion.

I never said that. I said that the existence of the AmigaOne (rebranded Teron boards which are bundled with AmigaOS4) has been dependent on some sort of protection.