Amiga OS 5 prediction

[DonnyEMU]

Let's be honest here if there really is an "OS5" it's probably a version of Linux with a new user interface, that looks Amiga-esque. That's what apple did, Un*x/Open Darwin underneath and it was portable to many different platforms.  

That's an easy way for them to not have this happen, they could claim compatiblity through E-UAE, re-work the art in the gui of some windows manager, and since you can easily port amiga apps to and from Un*x platforms they will say it beats Apple's OS..

AmigaOS 5 in reality would not have any relationship to the code in OS 4 and would have a web browser, open office, and could work on intel or powerpc chips..

Gee what a plan, have someone in in India and Sri Lanka rework the art in the windows manager, and boom you have an OS that runs on multi-cores and multiple cpus. All with little investment or work thanks to the open source community and the backs of their labor and a system outside the European community and the USA.

Other advantages would be you could have Mono and the .NET framework, and it's moonlight plug-in that would give you WM9 and DRM support and VC-1 codec support.

No more hard to please Amiga developers.. Gee why didn't I think of this earlier and get Bill to go for it.. I could have made a fortune just doing art on the windows manager.

Plus I don't have to deal with patents copyrights etc..

Wow... Could this be OS5 aka LINUX?

[jarroyo]

I do not believe they, A Inc, could make this a Linux Distro and get away with it. That would be the final nail in the proverbial coffin for this community.

The benefits of a QNX "distro:"
OS5 on QNX would be different enough from a Linux distro.

The source code has gone open source, see the announcement below.
http://www.qnx.com/news/pr_2519_1.html

The development effort would be realistic enough for a company like A Inc to undertake in a short time span.

Its proven technology in the embedded space. Can scale to be a full desktop OS and above.

The India company already has experience in the embedded space development.

ACK Systems, the developers of the motherboard already have a presence and experience in the embedded space

Amiga Anywhere would run on this platform, very easily.

Mated to the hardware spec already published by A Inc, it would make a hell of a platform. 64 Bit OS, Dual Processor cores, low latency architecture with all IO / motherboard components in one chip, low power / quiet system, etc.....

I can dream can"t I?.....:-)

[Fester]

MaDDuck wrote:

Hmmmmmmmm
Let's see....
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/06/1015235

Please see the answer to question 4.

[DonnyEMU]

Do you really think it's about this community honestly or is it about A Inc making money.. As far as the embedded space you forget that the "embedded space" india company you are talking about makes windows mobile programs (just like A Inc. makes games for that space). So your argument really doesn't hold water in the "embedded space" they are using an embedded maker to produce the prototype and someone else to do production. They'd have to used embedded because of form factor at this point anyway. Doesn't mean it's capable of being an "industrial quality" RT OS..

I figured my prediction would cause outrage. But honestly we don't call MacOS 10 "Darwin x86" even though that's what it is with a Mac Style desktop windows manager system and some extras..

So how would an Amiga OS 5 based on linux not do the same things?  

They have to make an architectural leap at sometime. Seems like it's time to me..

[Floid]

QNX would be 'ported' to PA no matter what.  Both products are aimed into the same market (heavyweight 'embedded') and PA is essentially just another PowerPC.

I have no speculation on what AInc. is or isn't up to, just want to point out that that fact doesn't carry much causality.

[Also, no insult to QNX meant by 'heavyweight.'  From observing that scene it's clear that some embedded engineers think using a kernel is 'heavyweight.']

[Tron2k2]

You know, it would be cool if Amiga used QNX as the base for OS 5.  There were a lot of folks who looked at QNX back in the day and went 'why are we using this TAO crap?!' and the answer is in large part that QNX' CEO and Amiga's CEO didn't get along.  Bill McEwen hated QNX, especially after Haage and Partner released their AmigaOS XL atop QNX-remember that?  It was their answer to Amithlon, so to speak.  

Amiga and Haage and Partner also, sadly, had their own great differences-and unfortunately the contract of McEwen's Amiga asset purchase from Gateway wasn't written in such a way as to guarantee H & P royalties be paid to Amiga, so H & P didn't pay them. They weren't technically supposed to release Amiga OS XL without Bill's permission because it used Amiga's IP, but they did it anyway.  And never paid Amiga any royalties from its sales :-(  Or, in fact, from OS 3.9 either.

It also wasn't written in such a way as to keep Petro from doing his own back door deals and in fact Amiga had to keep him on-with pay-even though he was pretty much ganking them the whole time!

It  really wasn't Bill's fault entirely that things went as they did, I think he jumped in with both feet before realizing how far the drop off was.

Maybe though, in the end, we'll get an OS authored by DKB hardware's own Dean Brown-last I heard he still worked in some way with Amiga.  That would just ROCK.  If Dean makes it, it won't suck.  That's my best case scenario prediction.  

However there's a fair chance that Amiga might market it wrong ;-)

[Waccoon]

It takes intuition to make a good product.  Bill doesn't have that, or there would already be a profitable product on the market.

If OS5 has a decent core, but uses the same braindead shells and file requesters as Windows, OS3, and just about everything else, that's a pretty good indication that the OS is destined for failure.

Apple couldn't write their own OS (Copland), so they dumped that project and built an interface on someone else's OS.  Look where it got them.  If Bill is spewing the same BS that OS5 will be better than OSX, chances are Amiga is still focusing on the core, rather than that new shell and file requester.

I don't doubt that OS5 will be released eventually.  It just won't be worth using.

[jarroyo]

"Do you really think it's about this community honestly or is it about A Inc making money"
----------------------------------------------------------

Businesses need to create a value proposition in order to be successful. An Amiga linux distro, I feel is not compelling enough in that respect to make it worth while; I would probably just get a Mac if this is the route they take.

QNX is different enough and arguably architectually superior to Mac OSX to make the kind of value proposition required for a successful platform.

Of note, Bill claimed that the India team is not developing OS 5; and while they do develop for Windows, they also do a significant amount of development in the embedded space that is not windows
http://www.amigadevindia.com/html/technology_embedded.htm

[jarroyo]

It sounds based on your description of the events that the bad blood was between H&P and Amiga Inc, not entirely against QNX.

Additionally, the situation internally at QNX could have changed since H&P and A Inc where going at it. It looks like from the link below that even as early as April 2007 things have changed at QNX.
http://www.qnx.com/company/qnx_harman.html

Besides, this is business, and any savvy business person knowns that grudges take a back seat to money. After all, who would have tought that McNeely at Sun and Gates at Microsoft would have ever gotten along?...:-)

Money make strange bedfellows....

[dentunes]

jarroyo wrote:
Lets be honest, starting an OS from scratch is not an easy thing.
There is a plethora of OSes out there that are far superior and further established, but little known. A unix clone would simply not suffice, and was done already by Apple.

A company like AInc can simply re-brand one of these as their own, and focus on software / features to add value and set itself apart from the rest.

Apple did what I am predicting A Inc will do if they want to keep things afloat. Mac OS X is Jobs old Next Step OS company that he created after he left Apple. When he returned to Apple he bought is own company, dressed up the Pig and called it Tiger..:-)

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but we can beat them with their own tactic. Jobs probably did it to pay himself, A Inc could do it to leap frog everyone.

Just for the record, Jobs didn't BUY his own company when he returned. He returned because Apple, under Gil Amelio, bought NeXT and the employees to go with it. Gil being the guy with the famous quote
"Apple was a ship with the hole in the bottom, and my job was to point it in the right direction"

I think Gil was Apple's Bill! lol  :whack:

[iMacMiga]

jarroyo wrote:
A unix clone would simply not suffice, and was done already by Apple.

Why the hell not? If it's a good OS who cares who did it first, or what it's based on. The quality of the product and it's technological advantages are the key issue, not, as many Apple users would have you believe, who copied who. The entire industry spends it's whole time copying each other. Some companies still remain better.

UNIX is a robust and standardized base, and is widely trusted and respected. An OS with modern features based on that sort of reputation could propel the Amiga name back to the limelight. Good though I'm sure it is (I've never used it), QNX is niche OS with only a fraction of the reputation. If they can make a good OS based on QNX then all power to them, but writing off a UNIX variant-based Amiga OS on the basis of other companies getting there first is ridiculous.

[JetFireDX]

Threads like these make me remember why I keep watching from the sidelines. It is so much fun to see the predictions, counters, and whatnot that people come up with relating to the Amiga! Weeee!

I always thought that if an Amiga-like OS was going to be based on another kernel and other underlying stuff I would hope it would be like this:

GoboLinux

A really nice sensible way of organizing things.

Write a new Workbench for it (like Finder on top of Darwin) and change or mirror the bash commands with "Amiga-named" versions that take "Amiga-compatible" parameters and it just might be close enough to be passable as a "new" Amiga OS. Would be for me anyway.

Still hoping on AROS though.

And for good measure.... no way OS5 will see the light of day. :-P  It is fun to think about. That and play Scorched Tanks on e-uae on my Mac are all I really have to do with the Amiga anymore.

[Steril707]

But Apple had hardware as well to support their Unix driven OS, giving some identity to the whole thing.

An Unix based Amiga OS is still uninteresting to the average Joe imo.

I see two variants of the Future Amigas:

The classic one: Stuff like Clone-A and to a lesser extent the Minimig, blown up as hard as possible for performance and being able to connect to more modern peripherals like VGA and PS2. Imagine a monster turbo classic AGA Amiga with a proper gfx card already built in and some other goodies. I think a lot of people would like that.

The modern approach: AROS on PPC or i386.  I simply don't see Amiga INC in Business a few years later, and i cannot imagine Hyperion, even if they win the court case, to go on working on something as niche as an Amiga OS by themselves one more time for OS 5. So it's open source AROS, or nothing.

[downix]

Tron2k2 wrote:
Bill McEwen hated QNX, especially after Haage and Partner released their AmigaOS XL atop QNX-remember that?  It was their answer to Amithlon, so to speak.

Hey wait a second.  What if that is exactly what they're doing, taking OS 3.1 (or OS 4.0?) and AmigaOS XL'ing it on top of QNX?  Development time would be ludicrusly short for a new OS.  Performance would be solid enough to be competitive.  *and* it could migrate to other embeddable CPU's rapidly.  They would, actually, have Amiga "Anywhere".

[SteveSMS]

Didn't anyone notice that the QNX brochure shows an iBook?
Quite ironic, if you ask me.


On topic: OS5 is NOT gonna happen.
I kind of lost faith in the new generation Amiga's.

I'll stick to my old 3k, 500 and 1200, thank you very much.

[Starrfoxx]

I find the development of the 64bit AROS more exciting and realistic than OS5.