Amiga, Inc: Close That Open Hardware!

[mikeymike]

That article is serious flamebait.  It's like going into comp.sys.amiga.advocacy and asking "what makes the Amiga so special".

It may be a sucky idea to some people that dongle'izing the A1 hardware so that OS4 won't run on non-official Amiga hardware, but at the end of the day, Apple made the same kind of decision (stopping the Mac clone market), which may have been for better or worse for it.  Yes, it would be more convenient for consumers to have a greater choice, but [generally, heh :-)] business produce products to make money.

[mikeymike]

Another thing - the Amiga community [generally] have got used to the idea of supporting companies/products by paying for them, but would the Amiga community have had this opinion if Commodore had continued success to the present day?

Helping a company whose products you like survive, because you know they need all the money they can get is one thing.  Helping a company who haven't had those kinds of problems so badly with your money isn't such a high priority though, is it?

NB: I would pay for Amiga software if I used it for >30 days and liked it.  Which I have done :-)

[mikeymike]

Not the old "MacOS only runs on Macs" again, please!

I wasn't raising it.  Just like I don't know all the factors in the equation of whether it would make more business sense to keep the hardware open or to keep it closed, neither do you.  Don't pretend you do.