Why isnt OS4 available on other PPC hardware?

[Lando]

Martin_Lee wrote:
Its hard to get the overpriced out dated Amiga hardware, so why cant we just have it run on other PPC hardware?

Id buy a copy for my Mac

This question has been asked a million times.

Amiga Inc want to make money from hardware without actually making or selling any.

So, they restrict the machines on which they will allow OS4 to run to those companies who agree to pay a license fee for each piece of hardware sold.

Apple will not pay a licence fee, hence you will never see OS4 running on your Mac.  Genesi won't pay either a license fee either, so you won't see OS4 running on a PegasosII, Efika, or anything else.

Amiga Inc have doing their level best to kill AmigaOS and anything to do with the Amiga computer since they bought the name, and to all intents and purposes they have succeeded.  The user base is now probably 10% of what it was when they took over 6 years ago.

You can either email Apple and ask them to pay some money to Amiga Inc and start bundling Macs with AmigaOS, or you can email Amiga and ask them to lift the licensing restrictions.  It is likely that neither will even bother to reply.

[Lando]

Savan wrote:

ts hard to get the overpriced out dated Amiga hardware, so why cant we just have it run on other PPC hardware?

The remaining Amiga companies are stupid, they would rather sell damn expensive hardware with a OS to a small fan base than port the OS to hardware what millions of people use.

Anything is better than a OS with no hardware.

And no software...

Even if AmigaOS could run on Macs, who would bother with it when they have OS X with hundreds of times more features and thousands of times more software applications.

People may install AmigaOS and boot into it on occasion out of curiosity, then boot back into OS X to get some real work done or play a game that isn't from the last century, but switching between the two just serves to highlight AmigaOS' deficiencies.

A computer is a tool, you use the tool which is right for the job.  The problem is, AmigaOS simply has nothing to offer any more.  In the past people didn't run Amigas just because of the OS.  They used Amigas because of the software - they had Video toasters, they ran Lightwave or Imagine, Vista Pro, DPaint, they played games etc.  All the software that was better than the equivalent on other machines at the time.  None of this applies any more.

Maybe some will be happy to sit and customise their Workbench screen all day and wonder at the marvels of watching two MPEGs and playing an MP3 at the same time, but to normal users, who actually need their machine to do something useful, OS4 is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.