Given the tyical willingness to pay in Amiga Land, I can ensure you that this generated no self-sustaining income.
People are willing to pay if the offer makes sense. Self-sustaining income? See "whack".
No, the part I have problems with is that you call something "Whack" that is beyond your limited understanding.
Let me present the business of selling RTG to Amiga for some of my investor friends and see what they think, I am pretty confident the word "whack" will be used. I mean seriously - RTG for an extremely marginal computer system, that has zero value outside of a small group of enthusiasts, and no value at all for retro nostalgics who mostly just want to play games on native chipset. If you think this concept of business has any validity, you are delusional.
Open Source might be all nice and certainly justified - specifically if the work is paid for by the tax payer. But I see also reasons why people choose (did and still do) other models. Not everything that is beyond Open Source is "whack".
And I did not say so, I said the P96 business model is whack, because it is mostly based on (false) assumptions about copyrights and intellectual property laws. There are plenty of cases when closed source is ok, for limited time and usecases, things have limited lifespan, systems that don't have users... once you offer code to the public, as part of an ecosystem, a "standard", something you know will be of general interest of plenty of users and developers (relatively), you damn well should pick an open source model for your product. Or be a huge software company that can guarantee a path forward.
People make choices for reasons. Probably for reasons you do not know, you probably cannot follow, or you do not or do not want to understand.
Yeah, people make idiotic choices all the time, nothing new about that, and I fully understand how it happens. What I fail to understand is how people insist on clinging to a failed and flawed idea for so long. I can only guess it is because admitting failure is too difficult, or because they somehow find satisfaction with the status quo and enjoy their position.
*That*, Kolla, is the problem I have with you. Closed-minded, unable to see beyond limits of your own experience.
I am glad you have problems with me, your views and understanding of how to successfully run an IT enterprise is stuck in the past, discussing with you is like diving into usenet groups from the mid 90ies. Call me narrow minded all you like, coming from someone with your views, that's almost a compliment.
