Francis Charig responds to Opinion Article

[Ohno]

Francis Charig who is the TAO chairman, dropped in and responds to the Opinion Article as featured here on Amiga.org last week. He also mentions intent2 which is in the work and he clears up some misconceptions in that thread about their relationship with Amiga Inc.

[asian1]

>From TAO

I still wonder WHY Amiga Inc / TAO DID NOT release AmigaDE / AA for Amiga OS / Linux 68K.

IIRC TAOS (the old version of VP) have 68K Translator and VM. I guess it is possible to create Intent version for 68K.

AmigaDE for 68K can be used as a bridge / application migration from classic Amiga machines to modern AmigaOS 4 on AmigaOne.

I hopeAmiZilla can be ported to AmigaDE, because if this project is succesful, the browser can run on top of AmigaOS 4.X, Linux,  Windows and PocketPC without any modification.

BTW is TAO Group afraid of Amiga Inc famous CURSES?

I hope I don't hear some "Hare" called "Bugs Bunny" as new TAO Chairman / CEO or the landlord auctioning TAO's group furniture in Reading, UK  :-)

[redrumloa]

Good to see Mr Charig stopping by. I hope he makes a habit of it:-)

[alx]

AmigaDE for 68K can be used as a bridge / application migration from classic Amiga machines to modern AmigaOS 4 on AmigaOne.

How?  AmigaOS4.x itself won't get the DE for a while - IMO the JIT emulator is enough for application migration :-)

[Waccoon]

I still wonder WHY Amiga Inc / TAO DID NOT release AmigaDE / AA for Amiga OS / Linux 68K.

From what I recall, Motorolla is trying to completely replace 68K with Coldfire and PPC.  Since Motorolla is an investor in TAO, that makes the possibility of a 68K port pretty slim.

I could be wrong.  Marketting attitudes change all the time.

By Kronos, from the original thread:

The DE is a good, but useless idea, cos noone
wants to let his SW run ony ANY HW without any
controll, and if you do controll the HW it runs
on like it has been done with the gamepack, you
could have just used a (maybe even free) portiblity-
layer like SDL,QT or similar and compile for
every target you want to support.

That's the choice of the developer, not a technical issue.  I don't see any reason why DE can't succeed.  Java seems to be doing well, even though it is architecture independent.

From what I can tell, TAO is a CPU translator.  Everything else is seperate.  All recompiling does is allow source code to run on a particular CPU.  Architectural differences and special features are handled by other things like the OS, drivers, the environment, and libraries.  Why is it such a far-fetched idea to have the CPU be translated, and let native drivers, libraries, and the environment handle everything else?

Also, the TAO technology DOES allow VP code to access special features of individual hardware.  It's up to the programmers to use it responsibly.

That's what I don't get about all this arcitecture indepenent stuff.  Once you allow programmers to use special features of a particular piece of hardware, THEY make the decision whether it will work on all platforms or not.  You might very well be using software that's based on architecture independent "DE", but then the application tells you, "Sorry, we only support computers with this particular feature".

You can't force developers to be completetly architecture independent.  It all depends on how many people and machines they want to support.  In my view, DE gives people the capability to support all machines, while still optimizing their code for individual systems.  It does not, however, guarentee that all apps written in DE will work across the board, allowing certain hardware platforms to succeed and others to be pushed out of the market due to a lack of support.  Idealy, what prevents this is the fact that software developers want as many customers as possible.  That doesn't work in the PC world, because there's so many PCs out there, and it's too hard and time consuming to do ports.  DE helps relieve the strain of getting software working everywhere.  I just can't guarentee independence.  Ultimately, that's up to the developers.

So, as usual, a complex marketting issue triumphs over technology.  Programs will be architecture independent only if programmers and managers want them to be.  That doesn't automatically make DE a bad idea, just a bit idealistic.

As someone who's been working with Perl for a while, now, I have no doubts that an architecture independent language can work and become very popular.  Hell, a lot of people say Perl is one of the best programming languages ever made (against my own opinion, of course).

I've always wanted an easy-to-use interpreted language like AMOS available on multiple platforms, because for the things I do, architecture independence is much more important to me than raw speed.  And supposedly, DE offers the speed of native code with the indepenence of an interpreted language.  If that doesn't fit the bill, you can always use Java in DE.

My only skeptisism about DE is whether Amiga can pull it off.  With so many financial rumors floating around, including those supported by Wayne, it's hard to tell where Amiga is headed.  The idea isn't the problem.  The problem is we need some kind of proof from Amiga is walkin on solid ground, that the existing community has a part in Amiga's future, and Amiga Inc. isn't just aiming for brand new customers.

So far, I am in no ways convinced.

[Kronos]

@Waccoon

The main problem witch Intent faces is that it
has to deliver a reason, why it is worth the hassle
(and money) a developer has to spend.

The "run everywhere" won't help much with
productivity-SW for several reasons:

a) There are only 5 platform to support.
Windows, Windows, Windows, Linux-x86 and OSX.  ;-)

b) The price/licence.
A QT-licence does cost in 4-figure-numbers,
but if you start on Linux, you can wait with buying
it shortly before release. No limitation or fees
for SW sold by you.

Intent in the DE-variant is quite cheap, but you
have to sign a NDA&SDA before you can even start
developing, and you are bound to pay a fee for
every single copy you produce by the SDA(*).

c) Apps done for a desktop, just DON'T scale to a
PDA/mobile, so you will need to do a rewrite anyways
(and there is QTopia to keep the QT-example).

d) SW compiled with QT runs directly under the
OS, and may even not be regognized as such, while DE/Intent looks
much more like WinUAE or so.

e) Intent simple isn't competition to QT and
others when it comes to creating GUIs.

Thats all a bit different with games targeted to
low-end PDAs and mobiles, but honestly, I'm not
impressed with what has been delieverd sofar.



* Doesn't really matter what the precice terms are,
you are forced to either accept what AInc demands or
to scrap your work.

[asian1]

>AmigaDE for 68K & Motorola

Last year, during Interview, Mr Bill McEwen mentions that 68K version of INTENT is ALREADY Available. I wonder why AMIGA Inc did not port it to AmigaOS 3.1 or 3.9. There is a promise that future AmigaOS 4.X will support AmigaDE.

>QT vs AmigaDE - conversion to native binaries.

When user want to execute program that use QT, they should install QT Library files. I guess similar thing happen at AmigaDE.

On AmigaDE / Intent, it is possible to convert VP binaries code ".00" to native binaries code.

The native executable binaries will be called:
".XX"
(XX is the processor code number, XX > 0)

>Stand alone.
On AmigaDE for Linux book, Amiga Inc mention about stand alone (not hosted / direct to HW) version of AmigaDE. I guess this plan is cancelled.

[Francis]

The message in this thread from Kronos doesn't seem to take in the comments from me sent a couple of days ago. I also don't think it is entirely accurate either. I suggest waiting a quarter for the first commercial intent SDK. Best regards, Francis

[YttriumOx]

Kronos wrote:
Doesn't really matter what the precice terms are, you are forced to either accept what AInc demands or to scrap your work.

Not true.  The terms quite clearly state that if your product doesn't pass Amiga QA testing or they don't want it or for any other reason decide it's not for them, you're free to do what you like with it.  Amiga have "first dibs" on marketing/selling/producing your program, but in the end it is still YOUR program.  Obviously, if it contains Amiga proprietary code obtained through your agreement with Amiga then you can't release the source code (or at least, not ALL of it), but you're free to market/sell/produce/distribute it however else you like if Amiga don't want it.

Also note that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with Tao themselves.  The Amiga NDA and SDA cover Amiga's IP and technologies (which are much more substantial than some people make out).  If you want to code for AmigaDE and want the latest and greatest tools available, sign an NDA and SDA with Amiga.
If you want to code for Intent and don't mind that you don't have access to Amiga's extensions, I'm sure Tao would be more than happy to get you started.  If you don't want to code for either of them, then, quite simply, don't!

Regards,
Ben de Waal
AKA YttriumOx

[YttriumOx]

Oh, and a quick question for Francis if you're still around and are able to/don't mind answering this:
Will Intent2 run on top of the same version of Elate as currently, or will there be a new complementary Elate along with it?

Regards,
Ben de Waal.

[Francis]

Dear Ben,

Our commitment to partners and manufacturers has been to make the new version the root implementation for backwards compatibility. Obviously we can never guarantee this absolutely as future variables may impact our ability to confirm 100% but we will make all reasonable efforts.

The earlier versions of intent were put out at the reasonable request of Amiga and then further outside pressure led to a free 'taster' ADK which was released to give an indication of some of the capabilities of intent. This next revision is the one that the Tao engineering and management teams have been working towards over many years and is put out at a time that we have dictated. There is a dramatic leap forward in terms of functionality, tools and documentation. It also reflects what we have learnt from the highly positive experiences we have had since putting intent out into the field in mass market deployed products in the last 18 months with companies such as Sony, Philips, Kyocera, Sharp and JVC. I cannot say any more without preempting our launch.

I think that those who had the ADK from Tao and now get the new version will find that they may have to make changes to their applications in some situations but the effort will, in most cases be fairly insignificant. Having upgraded to the new version, then at least you should find your software forward compatible. Of course we do not incorporate the DE feature set so DE applications will not run on the new version of intent.

Many thanks.

Francis

[bhoggett]

@Ben

Not true. The terms quite clearly state that if your product doesn't pass Amiga QA testing or they don't want it or for any other reason decide it's not for them, you're free to do what you like with it. Amiga have "first dibs" on marketing/selling/producing your program, but in the end it is still YOUR program. Obviously, if it contains Amiga proprietary code obtained through your agreement with Amiga then you can't release the source code (or at least, not ALL of it), but you're free to market/sell/produce/distribute it however else you like if Amiga don't want it.

"...if Amiga don't want it"

Otherwise Kronos is quite right, you have no control over what happens to your software at all. You can't decide when it goes on sale, you can't decide what licensing to release it under, you can't decide how it should be sold, you can't even realistically decide how much money you'd like to make out of it. If you don't like what Amiga decide to do with your software... - and they are entitled to hold your software back indefinitely until they feel it would be a good time to release it, even if that means years - ...well, if you don't like the deal they are offering you, there is nothing you can do about it. You are NOT free to seek another publisher, you are NOT free to release the product yourself, and you are NOT free to insist on your own terms and conditions.

Now, if I was going to give someone so much power under a carte blanche agreement, you'd think I'd have a right to know what I was going to get in exchange for all this? But no, the only way to find out what you are getting is to sign the NDA & SDA first. Talk about leaping blindly into the void and relying on faith to bring you to a safe landing...

The Amiga NDA and SDA cover Amiga's IP and technologies (which are much more substantial than some people make out). If you want to code for AmigaDE and want the latest and greatest tools available, sign an NDA and SDA with Amiga.

On what basis? What "latest and greatest tools"? Where are the products that demonstrate what has been achieved with these great tools? Surely you must see why it is imperative that any prospective serious developer would want to see exactly what it is that he's getting in exchange for handing out practically all the important rights to his work to a company with no track record worth mentioning?

AmigaDE is all hype, hype, hype. No results, just hype. I don't care what those under the SDA have seen. To everyone else it's all vapour.

I'm quite sure intent has an interesting future - though it is impossible to say at this stage whether it will be successful one too - and I am quite as convinced that AmigaDE has no future of any significance, though I expect in 10 years time people will still be telling us about the "latest and greatest" tools available to those under SDA, and there will still be no released software to demonstrate these great tools.

My only message to Amiga Inc and anyone else singing the praises of vapour technology is this: "Put up or shut up. Show us the results of your work or stop talking about it."

 :-(

The chances of any quality software being released gratis on AmigaDE? Nil.

The chances of any full size GPL apps or games being developed or ported for AmigaDE? Nil.

The chances of AmigaDE being anything more than a toy for a tiny cabal of geeky programmers? Nil.

Disclaimer: this little rant belongs in the thread about AmigaDE really, not in this one. None of this has anything to do with intent or intent 2.

[Ohno]

@bhoggett

My only message to Amiga Inc and anyone else singing the praises of vapour technology is this: "Put up or shut up. Show us the results of your work or stop talking about it."

Amiga Inc. is doing quite a good job at shutting up until they have something to show these days, so you don't have to target them. Since I'm one of those developers under NDA/SDA and I've been praising the Amiga-Anywhere environment I think you're attacking me among others?

You want us to shut up? So we cannot respond to people attacking something without even trying it, while we actually know at least a little bit what we are talking about? I expected a bit more constructive critisism from you.

There are a few early examples of Amiga-Anywhere content available (gamecards) so it is not vapourware anymore.
Hyped? Possibly, although I don't think it is.

The chances of any quality software being released gratis on AmigaDE? Nil.

Not true.

The chances of any full size GPL apps or games being developed or ported for AmigaDE? Nil.

Not true. (doom and quake were ported pretty quickly).

The chances of AmigaDE being anything more than a toy for a tiny cabal of geeky programmers? Nil.

At least those geeky programmers are having fun. Besides.. Linux started out as a platform for geeky programmers too and today it is becoming more and more of a threat to Microsoft Windows in the corporate world and will get better in the years to come. When the Mozilla team got together it started out as a team of geeky programmers to. They now have a very good browser which will get even better in the years to come.

You wanted quality apps on DE. Well quality takes time. It took Linux years to get where it is today and Mozilla took years as well.

Now seriously.. Your message was only posted to start a flamewar, wasn't it?  :-(

Regards,

Onno

[Waccoon]

The DE is a good, but useless idea, cos noone
wants to let his SW run ony ANY HW without any
controll...

By "his software", are you talking about the OS developer only, or everyone who writes software?  I don't believe application developers have a lot of hardware control.  A *LOT* of the software I use regularly at work is written in Java.  That's hardware control?

and if you do controll the HW it runs
on like it has been done with the gamepack, you
could have just used a (maybe even free) portiblity-
layer like SDL,QT or similar and compile for
every target you want to support.

I was under the impression you were talking about ALL architecture independent software platforms, not just DE.  My comments had to do with the idea of the DE, not Amiga's exact implementation.

Does anybody really know anything about DE besides the concept?  I'd really like to see this highly controvertial NDA and SDA, even though I have no intention of signing it.  I haven't had a lot of luck contacting Amiga after I bought the Party Pack.

The "run everywhere" won't help much with productivity-SW for several reasons:

Ah, so you are talking about the concept or architecture independence, not the specific implementation used by Intent and DE (which may change at any time until a final product is released).

a) There are only 5 platform to support.
Windows, Windows, Windows, Linux-x86 and OSX.

So, we might as well just give up on anything that doesn't have more than 5% market share, right?  I'm pretty sure there's a LOT more operating systems out there than Windows and Linux on x86, and not all of them a financial failures.

Intent in the DE-variant is quite cheap, but you have to sign a NDA&SDA before you can even start developing, and you are bound to pay a fee for
every single copy you produce by the SDA(*).

That might only be true of the SDK, not the full DE product.  I guess we won't know if Amiga Inc. changes the SDA / NDA until they are ready to release an official platform.  Bad PR and secrecy hardly helps their marketing situation!  But, so long as the "product" is in such a raw state, I guess they feel they shouldn't do it any other way... for now.

TAO did say that a lot of DE stuff won't work with Intent2, so I guess a lot of developing going on is experimental work.  I think it's a bit silly to release a product programmed for DE if the platform hasn't been fully standardized.  I'm sure a lot of stuff has to be rewritten anyway, every time a few changes are made to the platform.  The gamecards released a couple years ago were built on technology available at the time.

c) Apps done for a desktop, just DON'T scale to a PDA/mobile, so you will need to do a rewrite anyways (and there is QTopia to keep the QT-example).

Why not?  Mobile phones I can understand because of the sparce hardware, but PDAs are getting pretty powerful, with fast CPUs and reasonably sized screens.  Today's PDAs are a hell of a lot faster and more powerful than most classic Amigas, and we all know that a 14Mhz Amiga can still do some great stuff if it's programmed properly.  It seems to be more of an interface issue than a coding issue.  If you have to toss out all your work and start from scratch when porting from a desktop to a PDA, chances are you didn't plan your program well from the start.  Isn't that true of all multiplatform software?  If you don't do it right, just porting between Windows and a Mac can be a nightmare, and those machines are based on very comparable hardware that should scale just fine!

Besides, you're not going to write video editing software for PDAs.  How your software scales depends entirely on what you want to do with it.  Saying that software DOESN'T scale at all is going way overboard.

d) SW compiled with QT runs directly under the OS, and may even not be regognized as such, while DE/Intent looks much more like WinUAE or so.

So, what's wrong with that?  Does that mean DE apps can't talk to the OS at all?  If Intent can translate VP to native machine code, it should be able to translate platform calls to OS calls.  WinUAE hardly does any proper OS calls (at least that don't crash the host OS).  ;-)

e) Intent simple isn't competition to QT and
others when it comes to creating GUIs.

Well, I though that's what Amiga was doing!  DE is supposed to handle the GUI, multimedia, AVE, and stuff like that.  Intent is just the base platform, like Linux is just a kernel.  The interface is built on top of Intent, isn't it?

Thats all a bit different with games targeted to
low-end PDAs and mobiles, but honestly, I'm not
impressed with what has been delieverd sofar.

Neither am I, but then there's hardly anything to see BESIDES the game cards.  Like I said, I like the idea, I just don't know if Amiga can pull it off.  That shouldn't tell people that technology like DE is a bad idea, or that it is destined for failure.

But then, I still haven't seen the damn SDA and NDA!  I'm sure I'd think differently if I did, but only about Amiga, not the potential of DE.

What Would Amiga Do (Only Do It Properly)?

[bhoggett]

@Ohno

Amiga Inc. is doing quite a good job at shutting up until they have something to show these days, so you don't have to target them. Since I'm one of those developers under NDA/SDA and I've been praising the Amiga-Anywhere environment I think you're attacking me among others?

Anyone singing the praises of vapour, yes.

You want us to shut up? So we cannot respond to people attacking something without even trying it, while we actually know at least a little bit what we are talking about? I expected a bit more constructive critisism from you.

The point is that nothing of what you say is verifiable. In order to veryfy it, one has to sign and NDA and SDA, and if they find out you were telling porkies the NDA prevents them from revealing it.

There are a few early examples of Amiga-Anywhere content available (gamecards) so it is not vapourware anymore.

Aren't those game cards about two years old? What proof do they contain of Amiga Inc's contribution?

I think the lack of any product for the last two years says a lot more than those gamecards do.

The chances of any quality software being released gratis on AmigaDE? Nil.

Not true.

You're not thinking straight. If the software is of any quality, Amiga Inc will assume they can make money out of it and will not release distribution rights back to the author. The only way for this to change would be if there was so much software being developed, that Amiga Inc. would only cream off the best 5% of titles and reject the rest, therefore leaving lots of other software of quality for alternative distribution. But it takes quite a leap of imagination to see that happening any time in the forseable future.

Not true. (doom and quake were ported pretty quickly).

Yes, they were. So quickly that I believe they were ported before the SDA was even introduced.

So, which parts of Amiga Inc's proprietary contribution do the Doom and Quake ports make use of, and how do they get around including proprietary code into a GPL release?

At least those geeky programmers are having fun.

Yes, you said so before. In fact that was the only thing you could come up with when I asked what made AmigaDE so special. That and the way TAO implemented something, which has nothing to do with Amiga Inc's contribution at all. Well, programmers having fun is very nice, but it's hardly enough to make a platform successful.

Besides.. Linux started out as a platform for geeky programmers too and today it is becoming more and more of a threat to Microsoft Windows in the corporate world and will get better in the years to come. When the Mozilla team got together it started out as a team of geeky programmers to. They now have a very good browser which will get even better in the years to come.

Neither Linux nor Mozilla had to put up with the restrictions and secrecy surrounding AmigaDE. It's not the technology that sucks, it's the approach.

You wanted quality apps on DE. Well quality takes time. It took Linux years to get where it is today and Mozilla took years as well.

So? Both rapidly acquired veritable armies of developers, and it still took them ages. Where will AmigaDE get with the few people prepared to put up with Amiga Inc's demands?  Not to mention that for every Linux or Mozilla there are twenty other projects that vanished without a trace.

Now seriously.. Your message was only posted to start a flamewar, wasn't it?

No, it wasn't, and I'm getting pretty sick of people always making the same accusation when they don't want to answer my question.

What is it that makes AmigaDE special? Why will it attract people from alternative solutions? What makes it superior? What have Amiga Inc's added to intent to make it worth signing their draconian SDA agreement?

Isn't anyone capable of coming up with concrete factual and verifiable answers rather than just bombarding us with fluff?