AmigaOS petition update

[zudobug]

Hi,

IMO, if Amiga Inc. relied on the community to make their decisions for them, nothing would ever get done.  Right now everyone would still be passionately arguing their conflicted opinions and refusing to hear anyone elses side.  There would be no AmigaDE and no AmigaOne/OS4 in the pipeline.  Actually, Amiga Inc. would probably of thrown in the towel by now and left us to it.

They are a small company, this is a small community.  Everyone is suffering from the same desire to see the Amiga back at the top... Especially the guys at Amiga Inc.  Let them do things the way they want, because hey, they're gonna anyway.  There simply isn't time to listen to the ranting and raving of people that hate them for having a go.  And they haven't got the funds/resources to please everyone.

Apologies to anyone who doesn't like what I've said.

-zudo

[Seehund]

Hammer:

There's nothing wrong with certification.

I agree, certification is good. The petition isn't about that.

[Seehund]

ShadesOfGrey:

AFAIK bPlan have not announced any licensing terms, OEM or retail.

Not AFAIK either.

And why would we who want to buy AmigaOS and want to see changed distribution policies for AmigaOS start a petition to the MorphOS team, because they might or might not do something more or less similar to what Amiga Inc. has announced? If fans of a certain model of car were to petition the manufacturer of that car to prevent the model to be discontinued, would they be obliged to start petitioning every other car manufacturer to prevent the discontinuation of every other car model in order to keep the "validity" of their original petition?

Q: Will MorphOS support any other hardware?
A: MorphOS is open to any new platform or hardware. To have support it
requires complete specs of the hardware to port the low level
hardware code.

I can see the "low level hardware code" as being a dongle. No less than that of the A1's BIOS extension.

I can see the "low level hardware code" as being just that; functional firmware code, code for handling chipsets et c., rather than hardware vendor provided extensions without a practical purpose for the functioning of the OS and hardware, like a serial number or whatnot, with no other purpose than sitting statically to be checked up on by license verification code in the OS.

But I don't know.

I doubt that MorphOS, which probably will have an even smaller initial userbase than AmigaOS, would even be considered to be limited in the AmigaOS way. If things turned out like that I could very well consider signing a petition to the MorphOS team, but that's all unlikely speculation so far. Although I'm of course open to alternatives and hope to get a chance to try e.g. MorphOS, I'm personally more interested in AmigaOS ATM, and that's what this petition is about - the announced distribution policies are for all future versions of AmigaOS.

[Seehund]

zudobug:

There simply isn't time to listen to the ranting and raving of people that hate them for having a go.

I realise you're generalising, but after that I think I might have to clarify for others that I don't "hate" any company and the petition is most certainly NOT about anything even remotely like that. This is all about one issue, one single corporate decision, a stroke of the pen, that the petitioners as potential AmigaOS4+ users / Amiga Inc. customers wish to see changed to make AmigaOS a better, more attractive product and with that getting at least a chance to be successful.

AmigaOS != Amiga Inc. != the announced distribution policies for AmigaOS

I'd like to think at least that is clear by now.

Apologies to anyone who doesn't like what I've said.

Don't apologise for your opinion!

[zudobug]

Seehund,

You're right, I was generalising.  I guess it was a little unfair to post that message here as it looks like an attack on you personally, and I didn't mean that.

However, it was something I though of when reading some of the other flames and attacks (before they were edited) here.

On the subject of the petition, I haven't made a final decision one way or the other because I personally feel it is too early to tell what's really happening.  At this stage I can't see Amiga Inc.'s protection system doing too much damage.  It's probably best that the range of hardware available to OS4 is kept to a minimum to begin with anyway. By the time OS5 comes out and a realistic demand for hardware choice is there, a new approach may have to be adopted.

Thanks for your comments.  A bit of healthy criticism never does any halm and it's good to listen to (and try to respect) contrasting opinions.  And that goes for both sides. I guess that's what I've been trying to say.

All the best,

-zudo

[ShadesOfGrey]

Your response helps clarify the intent of the petition.  I was never sure if the thrust of the petition was dealing with maintaining an 'open' POP platform or that AmigOS 4 would not run on non-certified, non-licensed, hardware.

If you are interested in keeping one, unified POP/PPC market open to all users and operating systems, with competition on equal terms, then please join us and sign the petition!

If you are interested in helping AmigaOS survive beyond a short period of license-money income and to keep AmigaOS users from being unnecessarily deprived of hardware options, then please join us and sign the petition!

I take it you're more interested in the latter goal?  If so, I'm still a bit confused about the petition.  Everything I know about OEM licenses (incl. The OEM Software Licensing Site) indicates that Amiga Inc.'s position is not unreasonable giiven what we know about the OEM license's terms.  We haven't seen any specifics about an end user (EU) license, which is not the same as an OEM license.  We can only speculate about a retail license based on what Amiga Inc. and Eyetech have said about existing and pending 'Classic' PPC solutions and the A1 (Linux boards if released and A1 dev boards).  I would be willing to sign your petition if Amiga Inc.'s retail and EU licenses were unreasonable.  But as I see it, the OEM license is reasonable.


I had thought your primary goal was the former.  So I wanted to see if you would apply the same petition to bPlan/MorphOS IF their licensing were as 'restrictive' as Amiga Inc.'s.

You state in the introduction that you do not endorse any particular solution.  But to be honest, I did retain some skepticism the petition might just be a ploy to discredit Amiga Inc. and its efforts.

Thank you Seehund for clarifying your position.

:-o
Just so I'm properly understood.  I would be as skeptical of a similar petition regarding MorphOS, x86 AOS, etc.  I really don't like the way the Amiga Community has become splintered by extreme factions supporting one solution to the exclusion of another.  I want to avoid coming under fire from such groups and so the constant disclaimers.

[Seehund]

ShadesOfGrey:

I had thought your primary goal was the former. So I wanted to see if you would apply the same petition to bPlan/MorphOS IF their licensing were as 'restrictive' as Amiga Inc.'s.

IF that indeed would be the case I would support a similar petition. But as far as we know today, and to judge from the Q/A quote you provided, no demands are to be made on hardware vendors (regardless of whether the hardware is "open" or "closed")  in order to have MorphOS run on their products other than that specifications are supplied.

I'm not even sure of the relationship between bplan and the MorphOS team, and what kind of commercial entity that is. "MorphOS AG"? "MorphOS GmbH"? Is MorphOS the property of bplan? If MorphOS/bplan can be seen as one entity it would even make some kind of sense if they made Amiga Inc-like demands since they actually would be selling their own hardware in an Apple kind of way.

But again, the plans for distributing MorphOS have not been publicly presented AFAIK, and I have no reason to believe that they would do anything like this.

Amiga Inc. on the other hand has no hardware of its own, yet third party hardware vendors are expected to get licenses, provide license verification mechanisms and bundle AmigaOS. Of course that means that this "licensed" hardware is branched off from the rest of the market for the same hardware in its normal form.

Yes, you're right in that personally I'm primarily interested in AmigaOS, but naturally the size and development of and pricing in the hardware market which AmigaOS is dependent on affects AmigaOS and its users.

Thank you Seehund for clarifying your position.

No problem.
But OTOH, my personal opinions on anything aren't all that important in this case. I might think that AmigaOS should run on Zilog CPUs or that the Vatican should be sold to Uzbekistan. All that the petitioners have in common is that we publicly endorse only what is said in the petition. Nothing more, nothing less. That's the essence of a petition.

[Kronos]

I'm not even sure of the relationship between bplan and the MorphOS team, and what kind of commercial entity that is. "MorphOS AG"? "MorphOS GmbH"? Is MorphOS the property of bplan?

R.S. owns a part of bPlan, so yes MorphOS = bPlan, but according
to the MOS-faq, they are planning to run it on the A1, and rumours
say that it allready runs on the (old version of the) TeronCX  :-o  :-D

The only question that remains is if the Phase5/A1-versions will
come out at the same time as the Pegasos and if they will be free
for download.

[A3KOne]

Yeah.... Things were so much better back in the CBM days... we could run our OS on whatever hardware we wanted to....

/sarcasm

To me, at least.... ROMS are not a problem.