Anonymous wrote:
1) There is no "PPC market". There is the "Apple market" and there may one day be a new "Amiga market" and there are the IBM servers, but PPC hardware is not commodity hardware, nor do Apple or Amiga want it to be. Commodity PPC hardware would eat into Apple's source of income -hardware.
There is the POP platform, which e.g. the A1G3-SE and its Taiwanese cousins plus the Pegasos are based upon, and nobody knows what the future holds. I can understand why Apple would try to stop a commodity PPC hardware market and development since they make their own machines, but Apple's OS only runs on Apple hardware anyway.
Apple released their report for the second quarter of 2002 yesterday. They sold 813,000 Macs in Q2/02 alone! They can afford relying on a bundled hardware/OS/software solution and they could hypothetically be harmed by commodity PPC hardware (but I don't think a prospective Mac user would build his own computer and install something like Linux or Amiga OS for that matter himself).
Amiga knows this is true for them as well - but because of brand licensing, so they are making sure that anyone who wants AmigaOS to run on their hardware has to go through Amiga.
If Amiga didn't try to play in the hardware market but concentrated on selling their OS in as big numbers as possible, it wouldn't even be possible for this to be true for them as well. They don't have any hardware, and they rely on licensees coming along asking them to make the hardware of the licensees into Amiga Inc's hardware. If this is not despicable in the perspective of people who want to use Amiga OS on the best and cheapest hardware available, it's at least incredibly stupid and FUBARed.
The OS is Amiga's product, so it is their platform, and they get to decide who gets to run their OS on their hardware.
"Their" hardware? Well, it seems like Amiga Inc. are trying to make the hardware of others into "their" by compulsory licensing, but I don't see why anybody would be interested in that, given the tiny Amiga market and no chance to profits.
Of course the OS is Amiga's/Hyperion's product, and it's Amiga's ("after consultation with our partners, developers,..." Bah!) decision. I just think it's an abhorrent and counterproductive decision.
You say "I should be able to choose whatever hardware I want to run OS4". No, you shouldn't.
OK, "I
ought to be able to choose whatever hardware I want to run OS4, if only Amiga Inc. had any business sense and respect for their customers and didn't think they were Apple or that this was 1985".
If Apple didn't control their product so tightly, they'd be out of business, not more popular as some of you seem to imply Amiga would be if they just let any old hardware maker say their product can run AmigaOS.
The difference between Apple and Amiga is that the latter do not make their own hardware and their OS doesn't run exclusively on their own hardware, they think that other companies should modify their hardware and in return get a license to sell Amiga OS so they as licensees not only get a competitive edge over unlicensed hardware distributors but totally remove them from the competition.
Apple are still in business and earn money from their closed OS/hardware packages because they didn't stop updating their hardware in 1992, and they have a large enough piece of the market to be able to keep using that business model.
According to Ben Hermans, OS4 is aimed at current Amiga users and whatever other few enthusiasts there may be (not, as the exec. update implies, make Amiga OS king of the desktop world). If they aren't trying to take on Apple, then they shouldn't try to compete in their market. If they are pretending to be Apple, they're fscked.
Nothing would be contradicting Amiga to sell distributors licenses for "certified" hardware and hardware/OS bundles if Amiga at the same time offered OS4 for sale separately to us who don't care whether our identical hardware is labelled "made for Amiga OS", or us who don't care whether our hardware dealer once sold A1200's and C-1084's.
Amiga is NOT A SOFTWARE COMPANY!!! THEY ARE A LICENSING COMPANY. They make their money from selling the brand name "Amiga" and the rights to Amiga IP to other companies.
In that case, why not be happy with selling Hyperion's OS to anyone who's interested and earning money on licensing the Amiga IP and "Amiga OS" trademark to Hyperion, if that's an accurate description of what's happening?
I don't understand why any other hardware distributors than old Amiga-related companies like Eyetech (who even apparently still are "partners" with Amiga Inc) and the couple of others in negotiations would be interested in conforming to Amiga Inc's licensing terms and licensing the whole Amiga package to reach and compete in the tiny Amiga market?
Either they get a cut of your sales, or you don't get to use the name Amiga in relation to your product, nor do you get to sell a product that uses their IP
And that punishes us who may want to buy our hardware elsewhere. Hardware shouldn't be using IP from an OS anyway. Yeeees, it's Amiga Inc's (and their "partners'") decision, but that doesn't stop me from thinking it's bad, unless I have to be a licensee to think of Amiga OS compatible hardware.
What does it matter? There aren't enough consumers out there to buy any of these products enough to support all these companies. Amiga knows this, so they are trying to tighten the grip so they can squeeze the most returns out of this effort. Frankly, if all they sell is 5,000 machines, they won't last long.
If we could buy the OS separately, then we Amiga OS users would be an addition to the market currently constituted by Linux/BSD/whatever users. When we have to buy the OS together with modified licensed hardware, we are a microscopic market of our own.
Sure the current licensee(s) could probably sell a couple of thousand modified POP motherboards with OS4 bundled for a year or so. Then the well is dry.
The issue is really that the ones complaining most about this are more interested in commodity PPC hardware than they are in AmigaOS4.
Seeing that the major new feature of OS4 is that it's OS3.x ported to PPC, I am personally
very interested in PPC hardware (and maybe even more than OS4 in itself - it doesn't do very much on its own), regardless if it's "commodity", sold from licensed dealers bundled with the OS or sold from unlicensed dealers like today. I just want to choose for myself from where I buy what ought to be my hardware.
PPC MB's will NEVER NEVER EVER be as cheap or accessible as Intel/AMD's.
Of course not. But OS4 took the PPC path (some say "unfortunately"), so there we are.
It surely won't help the PPC market if Amiga OS compatible hardware will be a separate and strictly controlled market on its own.
The idea of the Zico spec was not to "run AOS4 on any PPC motherboard", it was to say "if you have a motherboard that conforms to this spec, if you sign a deal with us we will allow AOS4 to run on it".
That the Zico "spec" is a pathetic joke has only added to the confusion. Any personal computer, regardless of CPU and architecture, made in the last 5 years is "Zico compliant". The P.O.S. Dell from 1999 I'm typing this on would be Zico compliant if I had a Firewire card and a "next generation" gfx card from Matrox in it.
The Zico "specification".
