Just a thought about OPEN SOURCE

[RedWarrior]

Forgive me for making assumptions, but the following suggestion is based on two of them. 1) The Amiga is effectively dead, kaput, a distant memory, and 2) It will remain that way unless the current owners of Amiga Intellectual Property have an ounce of vision...

so here's my idea: Release a kickrom into the public domain. Say version 1.3 - that had the biggest wow impact on me with what the A500 could do. There are already programs like WinUAE etc that could be reduced to a bare-bones plug-in style application...

Potentially, you could have Amiga style scrolltext (not as seamless obviously) and sprite animations integrated into web-browser content delivery. Amiga file sizes are tiny, and could easily become part of the web experience- and over time, maybe as ubiquitous as Flash. The alternative seems to be our current scenario; Bill McEwen (is he still alive?) sits on the I.P. of Amiga trying to hock outdated hardware to a market he thinks is still living in the 1980's... dust collects, and once we all die- the Amiga will barely rate a mention in a retro computer history book.

Let some of it go free! It would act as the most widespread, open-source and ultimately free marketing tool Amiga could ever have. There will never be a use for the 1.3 rom otherwise... so why hoard and protect it? The open source community have a million times more passion and resources to pour some life back into our beloved, but defunct, platform.

Would love to hear back from Amiga, the company... if they're still conscious.

[Dagon]

The Amiga is effectively dead,

If by alive you mean "to take over the world" and take the position that windows have now, you are right. But by my definition AmigaOS will be alive as long as there are users that are still using it, developers that still develop etc.

If I can browse (most of the sites that I m visiting regularly work fine with amiga browsers), take my e-mail, chat, listen to mp3, watch divx and dvds, program in C++, write and print documents, read pdf books etc that is if I can do what I do in my everyday computing, for me will be alive just as FreeBSD or BeOS etc are.

1.3? ... who needs that when there is Aros?

[benJamin]

I, too, had a similar thought a while ago:

A deployment of UAE as a browser plugIn.

Does not need a ROM to run .adz files which bang the hardware out of the box.  Probably not as fast as Java, but quite capable of delivering some interesting content.

AmigaOS as a hosted environment is another thing altogether; how would it communicate with the world outside its sandbox?

Another thing: what would be the standard 'hardware' requirements for software written to run in these 'FlAmi' (TM, patent applied for) ROM-freed environments?


Is it really worth the effort when old Amiga games have been superbly converted to Java anyway (I'm thinking Vision Software, here)?

A good idea, yes.  I don't have time to do it myself, nor the expertise with the Windex platform to have it automatically install itself on every computer that visits Google with IE, either.


benJamin

"Ah, dreams,
 They will be the death of me.

 But, then I'll wake up."

[RedWarrior]

I guess just from a demo perspective we seem to have infinitely more imagination in the Amiga world- whacky 3d scrolltext and really innovative animations all on (relatively, now) crappy hardware. I really miss seeing imaginative stuff like that (I've yet to see anything come close to Rebels Megademo II in PC land...) - Surely there's room for that kind of stuff on the web? Flash certainly isn't pushing the envelope in that arena...

And then there's mobile phone content... nearly all mobiles have faster hardware than an Amiga- does anyone see the potential?
 :idea:

[Piru]

@RedWarrior

Potentially, you could have Amiga style scrolltext (not as seamless obviously) and sprite animations integrated into web-browser content delivery.

Actually these things are always HW banging, so you don't need any AmigaOS for these.

So just hack along with the plugin...

[dammy]

so here's my idea: Release a kickrom into the public domain.

That will never happen as it's an "asset" of Amiga Inc, which it already has little of.

Far better idea, dig into your wallets and donate to this and to this.

Dammy
TeamAROS