Roadshow for 68K -Needs your support!

[biggun]

First of all I would like to congratulate you to your work and thank you for your decision to continue support for the 68K AMIGA line!

While the checksumming code certainly contributes to the performance, speed comes from how fast you can move data to/from the network I/O requests into/out of the TCP/IP stack's internal data structures. I'm lucky to have found one of the fastest copying routines to do this job.

This sounds very interesting.
If you say the copy loop is important for the network performance.
Would you mind in the future to include a 68050 version of this routine which might be tuned to use a parallel load? We could handwrite this code for you if you are willing to include it.

[biggun]

In 2003 Roadshow 4.205 managed to squeeze about as much out of an "Ariadne I" card as possible, and that's with a 40 MHz 68040 CPU in an A3000T. Once you get this far, the limiting factors are more with the expansion hardware than with how much faster a hand-optimized copying routine for a specific CPU may run.

I see.
Of course for the NATAMI the 68K CPU has now access to 100MB and Gigabit Networkcards.

[biggun]

Closed source apps meant competition and a market, as long as the market existed. I'm not sure we have had one in the last 15 years.

Whoever wants to build and maintain an operating system probably isn't exactly in the same camp as an application software developer.

Cooperation only exists if there is a common ground. If the work being done leads to commercial work, you absolutely have to have competition. OK, it's one thing to be competetive and another thing to be snide and aggressive about it. We certainly had our share of drama queens and fanboys in this field, and this isn't going to change. If you cared about the Amiga you were probably really passionate about it, too. It's natural that the end result can involve the bile and the trolling we all came to expect.

Well, you don't have to like it, and you don't have to play that game.

Given how software developers tend to be, often socially somewhat inept, it's kinda inevitable that sparks will fly because of a failure to communicate what's being done, and why. Amiga software developers can play nice, they just didn't always do. Given that Commodore was always such an inept and weak force in the Amiga business, the 3rd party developers came to dominate the business. And this culture has persisted, with the nasty side-effects of the bullying and the name-calling.

If you ask for cooperation you ask for some degree of level-headedness and maturity. Funny thing: whenever somebody asks for exactly these two to be applied he's almost certainly not going to get them.

I have to say Olsen is making all very good points!


I fully agree with you that doing commercial closed source software is not wrong.

And open source software does not at all lead to better products.


But I can see two advantages of open source.

A) Especially for documented and not to big projects - open sourcing them allows more people to learn from it. This is nice.

B) Open sourcing "abandoned" projects is also a nice behaviour.
That AWEB sources where open sourced when the author decided to stop developing them was a good deed. While AWEB did not became a Firefoy killer the open source team working on AWEB did a huge number of bug fixes on AWEB since then.
Quake is another good example. After makind their revenue with the game the sources were released and people could learn from it or port it to other niche platforms as the AMIGA.



I think what a real problem with software is that you can no guarantees.
Someone can buy a piece of software as your "Roadshow"-stack today - and tomorrow the author can decide not to support it anymore. This situation kind of sucks.

I think its right to pay a price for a good price of software.
But I think its bad to have no guarentee of support and if the company or developer decides go not support it anymore - not being able to get even the smallest bugfixe or minor enhancements anymore.


I think a good solution would be some sort of "community" contract.
That before a project becomes abandoned the programmer will release the sources like is was done was AWEB.

This is at least my opinion. What do you think?