Korodny wrote:
Can you imagine Ben Hermans facial expression if you would have asked him 15 months ago to develop OS4 as a "secondary" OS for Apple and Pegasos customers? I can.
I'm not sure. The classic "dollar-signs in the eyes" expression?
Hyperion's most important condition was that somebody provides a dedicated hardware platform for their OS.
Ah, but there is no dedicated hardware platform for AmigaOS. The Teron boards are not dedicated to any OS. A mobo will run any OS that's compatible with it. For the Teron boards that has predominantly been Linux.
The
distribution of
some of the Teron boards, and the
distributor of those is artificially dedicated to AmigaOS, and there can be no alternatives. That's what's so grotesque.
Escena had left a few months earlier and the Pegasos runs MOS. Eyetech was the only candidate left, and as they don't have the neccessary engineering skills or the money to fund an external development team, they had to adopt an existing design - the TeronCX/PX.
No, Eyetech has never been a sole alternative since the Escena A1-1200/4000 projects failed. They're "just" another computer shop and distributor. The Teron boards have never been dependent on Eyetech. The more distributors the merrier though. The current dependency on Eyetech is an artificial invention, which has arisen from a licensing deal.
Despite the fact that they're using a finished motherboard design, Eyetech have pumped serious amounts of money into the A1-G3/XE. But now other companies (Terrasoft) will be selling the very same motherboards (this was planned from the beginning) at a lower price, as they don't have to pay licensing fees to Amiga Inc. Would you buy an Eyetech AmigaOne if you could get the same motherboard from Terrasoft - at a lower price? I know I wouldn't.
Precisely. There's no reason to why a user of AmigaOS should be treated as a retard compared to if he was running e.g. Linux. If a customer prefers one vendor (for whatever reason; price, support, geographic proximity, ugliness of the logo, whatever) over another for the EXACT SAME product, he should naturally be allowed to choose that vendor for his purchase. This is healthy and desperately needed competition.
Whatever money one distributor has pumped into the sales of somebody else's product is irrelevant to the end-customers. We're not here to play charity. AmigaOS can't be dependent on that people should be prepared to pay extra for one third-party hardware distributors' "investments" (and even the Escena failure!). If a customer feels that "this distributor has payed more money for selling the same board" (which is odd...) would be relevant to his selection of vendor, then fine, let him have the OPTION to buy from there.
By the way, even before Terra Soft became a Mai VAR/distributor (which of course has been anticipated since the first hints that they were testing YDL on the boards), Mai sold the boards themselves, cheaper than Eyetech. I don't know what Inguard charges for their complete Teron systems.
The licensing scheme (amongst other things) protects Eyetech's investments into the AmigaOne. Without such a protection, Eyetech wouldn't have started the project at all (IMHO). Without the A1, there wouldn't be OS4.
Nonsense. The very existence and the development and sales of Teron boards have never been dependent on Eyetech. That's a ludicrous notion. If anything, OS4 has been dependent on Mai. The invented dependency on Eyetech (and all those other eagerly waiting hypothetical licensees...
) is a business construction - and it's totally unnecessary, IMO.
As for the licensing scheme protecting Eyetech's investments in Teron boards, whatever those investments might be... I can only say that it's highly unfortunate and sad that AmigaOS, its possible hardware base, marketshare, commercial potential and customers are to suffer and pay for the costs of a third party hardware distributor. If a distributor has invested money it is to be recovered by sales of the product he's distributing. If he can't compete with other dstributors, tough luck! Then customers of ANOTHER product - AmigaOS - should be allowed to turn elsewhere for their hardware neds.
