Indeed I do not respect choices, I reserve my respect for _people_, and how much I respect people, depends on their choices. So, when people keep doing silly choices, I respect them less. Just because someone wrote some good code, does not make them good people, there are brilliant coders who are really terrible people and who do a lot of bad choices. I have little respect for them.
What I am saying is that authors who care about their work, better come out and show it, and do it themselves and not by proxy of people they barely have any contact with.
Remember how copyright laws started? It was all about what is beneficial for _society_ in general. Same with patent laws. This original agenda has long since been hijacked by people with much sinister agendas.
Nonsense. Opening up the platform is what can actually help people support it. The level of hypocrisy in Amiga community is staggering, how so called "piracy" is "ok" as long as it doesn't happen in the "open". Look at Cloanto, when you buy AmigaForever 2016 it comes with loads of cracked games and even "illegal" firmware for CSPPC for OS4.1SE to work. Look at Reaction aka ClassAct, now the official OS4 "toolkit"... how pleased are Caldi et al these days about how that "deal" went through? Who is screwing over who here??
I was never in the P96 "club", I always used CGFx whenever possible, and it is in a much healthier state than P96. For example, the CGfx3 SDK is where such SDKs should be - on aminet.
I am blaming them for picking a really bad business model for developing such software, as in doing "bad choices" (see above).
I work for a non-profit to bring Internet to higher education institutes in Norway, I am paid to design and implement solutions that enables and allows research and education to take place in ways and locations where it has not been possible before. Like in the Arctic areas for example. We pick open source over closed source whenever possible. We pay people to write open source, we even sometimes take "dead" open source projects and revive them.
Because I do a good job, matching their expectations. Coding, hacking, chewing gum and glue, so that students and researches can have working internet access wherever they go, in my country and beyond.
Most importantly - I do work that actually matters to my society, and no strings attached, hence society pays me.
I do that too, I got more projects than I have time for, doing stuff for free. It happens that I volunteer for work that I find satisfying.
My conclusion is that since the authors chose to not care, why should anyone else.
Software that is locked away and not maintained _is_ worthless. For example, how much worth is the P96 SDK right now? How useful is it _right this moment_? Tell me, so I can pay for it in hard currency, and liberate it.
This is precisely the problem with binary only software. Once a software developer decides to cease support and development , what precisely are you paying for? By opening it up for others to continue developing you are allowing your work to grow , mature and potentially have the support of a community.
What precisely does the license grant you ?
1) Entitlement to future updates ? - No , development is stagnant
2) Support when things go wrong ? - Doubtful why would an inactive developer care?
What does this grant the developer of P96?
Given the above. possibly some pennies every now and again.
No-one benefits from this , least of all the Amiga community.
What we should be doing is supporting ACTIVE developers and projects that have some sort of long term future.
We know all this though - when the final nails were in the coffin of commodore
development stopped , there were no more machines, no new hardware. The OS development continued, but the current developer has decided its better to target high priced PPC hardware for no relevant reason. The community stepped in - we now have mature alternatives such as AROS, which has been ported to different architectures - and the OS will have a future even if AmigaOS4 development stopped altogether. Sneer all you want about Open Source but without it and alternatives AmigaOS dies when Hyperion dies.
There is no problem with closed source software however - but developers should really think hard why they shouldnt open up the code when the doors are closed for the last time.
