Freeloaders? Good Lord, when did people in this scene get so pedantic and hostile. Maybe I'm of a different mindset - personally I think *anyone* that runs *any* Amiga variant, whether it be emulation or something like Amithlon, AROS on commodity hardware, MOS on PPC Mac's, OS4 on legacy PPC kitted HW or OS4 on NG systems, or the "good 'ole boys" that like the real deal, the old and original C= era hardware, well I think we should be thankful that 20 years after the demise of Commodore, we should feel blessed for even having a scene of any kind. Many other vintage computer scenes have dried up and died entirely, we are lucky to have the community we have, quite honestly.
If PPC UAE support turns out to run well, it can only help what's left of the scene to experience a side of the Amiga hobby that perhaps they haven't had a chance to due to the high cost of entry in regards to the PPC based NG OS4 machines. After all, some guy might but OS4 for WinUAE and end up buying a SAM or X*000 machine, and quite frankly, the more the merrier. I only hope UAE supports MOS in the future as well.
UAE is a free product. ROM's and the OS are not free. However, I am not delusional enough to believe that even a major portion of UAE users are running bought and paid for ROM and OS copies. That being said, many of these people have likely owned 10 Amiga's in their years and thus paid for such items ten fold. I will readily admit that when I got back into the Amiga almost 7 years ago, I found UAE first, so perhaps I can be classed as a freeloader as well. I had 20 year old OS disks from my last legacy Amiga sitting here with absolutely no way of imaging them, and I simply grabbed ROM dumps and install adf's off Pirate Bay. I paid for them many times over in my years and lost zero sleep "pirating" them via a torrent file. No guilt in the least. I pay for what I use without exception, and I paid for the original OS many times over.
I shudder to think that Hyperion would ever "lock" OS4 down so it wouldn't run on UAE at all. They have made many a perceived blunder over the years, but I'd be shocked if they shut the door on UAE users wanting to buy OS4. A sale is a sale, after all.
