AmigaOS petition update

[HeUnique]

It is quite unfortunate that someone is doing such a "petition" without trying to understand Amiga's position quite well (or so the petition author seems to mis-understand).

Amiga Inc. wants to be back in life, and prefferable - back in business. A business is created for profit. By allowing anyone under the sun to ship boards with Amiga OS without any qualifications - you'll get tons of nightmares in terms of support. I'm sure that if Amiga will give up their requirment for qualifications and approval - there will be hardware vendors which will supply either bad parts or partially compatible boards which the user won't know about them until the user will have a problem - and point the finger to Amiga Inc.

Amiga Inc. doesn't want much - all they want to do is to have a formal licenseing program which the vendor submits his board for approval that it works with Amiga OS 4. This is exactly the same thing that graphics card manufacturers doing today to get an "OpenGL approved" qualifications (from SGI) or to get "DirectX approved" from Microsoft. Do you see a petition to refuse those qualifications from users? I don't.

Amiga Inc. wants to have this approval procedure - and it's not about the money (trust me - I've been at the business of qualifying boards for industrial use) - the money that a hardware vendor needs to pay is pretty small actually - something like few thousand dollars - which needs to cover the costs of testing, and red-tape.

Amiga Inc. also stated clearly that they are supporting MORE then EyeTech's boards! go look at Bill's latest executive update and see that he names 2 more names other then Eyetech's. If your preffered hardware vendor wants to play cheap and refuse to work with Amiga - then you should consider email him and ask him to talk to Amiga. Of course, if your hardware vendor belives that MorphOS or other OS is better then the upcoming AOS 4.0 and your vendor (which you already purchased a board from) doesn't want to qualify his hardware - then it's really a problem for you and him.

If I was a PPC board hardware vendor, I would be happy to be an Amiga OS licensee - after all, if I set my price competitivly with EyeTech (and lets face it - 800$ for a PPC board with upgradable CPU socket and G4 processor is very profitable to them) - then I could sell quite a lot of those boards! I'm pretty sure that Amiga Inc. won't sell the AOS for $50 for the OEM - which is a nice (although small) additional profit to me - whats wrong with that? and all I need to do (if I was a motherboard vendor ) is to pay some money to Amiga for test passing - and it's worth it! it's called "business"..

Lets not forget one more thing - if Amiga will start selling AOS 4.0 with the plug to anyone - then maybe 50 people will buy - and the rest will copy it! I really don't think that it will be that hard to hack AOS 4.0 to work without the Amiga Inc's special ROM - so 50 will buy it, and 5000 people will copy it. See the newsgroups messages with AOS 3.5 went out.

I really hope that Amiga Inc. will start selling AOS 4.0 soon (and I hope Hyperion will finish AOS 4.0 development soon - guys, some news from you about status update will help a bit) and we can prove to the world - Amiga is back, and it's in the stores!

Thanks,
Hetz Ben Hamo
heunique@slashdot.org

[HeUnique]

You wrote:
"(One of) The issue(s) is that they shouldn't have to become licensees for anyone if customers wish to use their hardware to run whatever OS they bloody well like. The petition is against the compulsory licensing/bundling/dongling required to let companies sell their own products to AmigaOS users."

Excuse me - signing with Amiga DOES NOT limit the vendor to anything! for all they care - the vendor can sell competing OS's as well - be it MorphOS, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, or anything your vendor want!

Nothing really stops you from buying a board from a non licensed company and buy AOS 4.0 seperately - it's just that your hardware will not be supported by Amiga. Got AGP/Gart problems? USB problems with AOS 4.0? call your vendor, Amiga won't help you.

Hetz

[HeUnique]

Allow me to reply shortly...

1. about the quotation marks in the "petition" - because IMHO it's a stupid petition - again, it's my personal opinion only.

2. As for the slashdot stories - it's not my own decision wether to post a story or not. Some times when some of the crew can post - he posts, while other times, many of the slashdot authors refuse to post stories about Amiga until some stuff will be out..

We did posted Amiga stories. Some examples:
* the Amiga screenshots
* the Amiga DE
* Review about Amiga DE
* Eyetech offer for developer boards
and quite few others - so you cannot say we ignore the Amiga.

Rest assure that once AOS 4.0 will be out - I will see that it will be posted slashdot and Hyperion and Amiga Inc's web sites will be slashdotted. be warned

Hetz Ben Hamo
heunique@slashdot.org

[HeUnique]

Kronos dear,

May I point you to Bill's latest executive update and I quote: "With regards to OS 4.0, you may purchase this product separately from the AmigaOne, and it can be loaded and used on other Amiga PPC products and systems and are certified for OS 4.0."

As for the certification stuff - I run Office 2000 under Linux on my X86 using CrossOver office. Has it been certified by MS to run on this configuration? nope, but it runs - same thing with AOS 4.0 - you can buy it, but they're not responsible if it will run on unsupported hardware.

As for the hardware that AOS can be running - I qoute: "OS 4.0 will run on other PPC products besides the AmigaOne, like the CyberStorm and Blizzard PPC accelerator cards. That's because you, the members of The Community, with many and varied needs, wanted this support."

Got that?

Hetz Ben Hamo