More On Phoenix Developer Consortium

Mike Bouma writes: "The Phoenix Developer Consortium is an developer organisation which is unhappy with the currently available computing solutions. John Chandler has written an article about a small start-up company which has been one of many developers to tap into the organisation for resource contacts and advice. "It allowed them to extend their resources and survive the perils of being a small company in a large world." If you are a similar minded developer and want to join and help others or yourself to take your Ideas2Reality contact Greenboy and include the following information (signing a NDA will be required). Among the members are important figures involved in the development of OSes like the Amiga DE, MorphOS and QNX RtP."

Comments

I've got some what-ifs too!

[Chuck Flynn]

However, and here's the interesting part for the Amiga community, there is no reason why it can't run anything else - Ideas2Reality will even provide open documentation on the platform for third-party developers. In fact, when I asked them if something like MorphOS might be seen on the platform, "We're looking into it!" came the excitable reply. Good news indeed if it goes ahead.

Hey, I can play the what-if game too!

1. If it gets funded
   
2. If it gets built and
   
3. If it's affordable and
   
4. If it's implemented well and
   
5. If developers rally around it and
   
6. If consumers buy it and
   
7. If it gets a strong application base and
   
8. If it doesn't get bought out and quashed by current heavyweight, then

It could be the platform for you!

Re:I've got some what-ifs too!

[WasterDave]

If consumers buy it

Before consumers buy it, it has to be in the shops. While it's all well and good to yak about selling it over a website, as a sales channel this basically sucks.

Just the logistics of getting things in the shops blows me away. For, like, half a dozen (and upwards) retail chains in - say - thirty countries you have to explain exactly why they should put your Amiga MorphOS Geek/2 Buzzword-Tech thingy on their valuable shelf space rather than boxes and boxes of playstation 2's.

Go on, why?

Dave

QNX is most of the way there.

[be-fan]

As an real, usable alternative to the currently available OSs, QNX RtP is most of the way there. It has a nice, fast, slim core architecture, fast response times, a well-developed package management system, it has a fast GUI, a complete API, and some great networking (GUI transparency, distributed processing, the works). Still, some areas need work. The filesystem needs to be totally replaced, and the VM/swap system needs a good bit of work. Also, the desktop environment, while certainly pretty, needs a lot of work from the usability standpoint, and its configuration services need to be more complete.

Re:QNX is most of the way there.

[be-fan]

It's always had drag and drop:
Drag and Drop programming The fact that many programs don't use it yet is immaturity in the desktop environment (which I mentioned) not immaturity in the core OS.

Re:QNX is most of the way there.

[be-fan]

How did Linux users ever become so obsessed with installed base? I could have easily said, 5 years ago "So what if Linux is technically superior? Nobody uses it yet!" Doesn't good technology count for *something* around here?

Re:QNX is most of the way there.

[squiggleslash]

Because while Linux itself 8 years ago didn't have an installed base (5 years ago it was well on its way) it was at least compatable with a family of operating systems that did. If someone produced a really good OS compatable with Windows, nobody would care much about "installed base" either.

Installed base/compatability with a platform that has an installed base matters because it's terribly difficult to get support for a platform that doesn't have enough users to justify the effort, and it's difficult to get enough users to use a platform that lacks support.

That said, I don't necessarily agree with the person you're responding to that installed base is much of an issue for the QNX RtP, as it is POSIX compliant and has an X capability (it'd be nice though to see programmers integrate it with the Neutrino as is being done on Mac OS X. RtP does need momentum, so that the things that make it "a better *ix" get used.
--

Re:QNX is most of the way there.

[FFFish]

QNX has been around since nineteen-bloody-eighty. That's over twenty years.

How the hell do they stay in business if "nobody" uses it?

It's all over the damn place. It's a fanfuckingtastic embedded system, for starters. And it's fully mature, unlike *some* OSes I could name [kaff]linux[kaff].

--

Re:QNX is most of the way there.

[be-fan]

Actually, QNX X apps look just like standard RtP apps, just uglier (except GTK ones, Qt isn't ported yet). There's not seperate "X Window" or anything.

As a member of Phoenix

[downix]

This is probably one of the biggest cases of being caught with your zipper down I've ever been a part of. We're *just* getting our act together, with several projects under the umbrella, and now this occurs. We don't even have our webpage up yet. But cest'la vive.

For some more information about Phoenix, allow me:

We're a new group, no we did not make replacement boards for this or that. We're only a year and a half old, and only with a few products in-works or near-release. The NDA is not to steal ideas, it is to protect those who are not yet ready to have their ideas posted to the public. A premature slip can cause entire projects to fail. We're not big corporate america, out to take ideas and claim them as our own. We're joe-blows with ideas and dreams of our own. We've got game developers, hardware designers, OS companies, all with the goal of getting us PAST the Wintel box. Of getting PAST this concept that computers are a big dumb box that you have to sacrifice your firstborn to in order to get work done on them. That is what Phoenix is all about, and why I'm proud to be a member of her.

Re:Good luck - you'll need it

[be-fan]

There will always be people (maybe a majority, maybe not) that will just want to sit in front of their 10GHz (100W, 2lb heatsink, oh baby!) proc and 25inch monitor and zen. They deserve a better system too.

Re:Can you imagine...

[be-fan]

This is funny. QNX has this built-in (transparent no less!) See the article on QNet.

Re:But AmigaOS is still even now better than Linux

[sagacious_gnostic]

I think that AmigaOS is very underated. Back in it's hey day it was a multitasking OS that fit in (i think) 256MB ROM. That's no mean feat. Exec (i think that's what the kernel was called) is something that should be studied. Not to mention all the custom chips that could do co-processing (something that PC's have only started doing in the last few years); shoving off gfx stuff to where it belongs - the graphics chips. I would not go as far to say "AmigaOS is better than Linux", but I will agree with you in that, for it's day AmigaOS was a very worthy technical achievment. And the writer of Exec should get more credit than he usually gets.

The market of the dissatisfied

[Alien54]

My dad is not a geek, although he knows enough to do upgrades, etc.

Even he is mad at MS.

It sees that there is a large collection of users that are unhappy with MS and their fools-gold-plated tin handcuffs. They would be so much happier if they didn't have to use it because of work, or whatever. And they would do so if they could.

Unfortunately they are enslaved to the MS apps. But they would revolt if they could.

So there is a market if someone could pull it together, somehow. I can only applaud and encourage guys like these to keep on trucking. If no one tries, then it certainly will not happen.

Re:But AmigaOS is still even now better than Linux

[FFFish]

Bah. Back in its day, OS/9 (the real OS/9, from Microware) was running circles around AmigaOS. Pre-emptive, fully re-entrant, API similar to Unix, and fit in less a 16K ROM in its most embedded form. Had a GUI system with widgets (RAVE) that were beyond any other system's capabilities at the time.

Of course, as an OS designed for the embedded controller market, it didn't see a lot of use in the home...

--

Optical Associative Computing

[Baldrson]

If these guys want to have a serious impact on the platforms in use, they will either have to surf the existing platforms with something like TIBET(tm) or they will have to create a radically new platform that is so much better than anything else that it will seed a new regime of technology. For that, IMNSHO they should team up with the optical associative processing guys at Colorado State, the Mozart guys in Europe and the Postgresql guys before taking off to do yet another BeOS.

Amiga

[stepson]

My girlfriend and I were discussing old 80s computing while trying to get her Atari working (we did actually! Its amazing how much its like MacOS today, or windows, and it was from 1986). She mentioned that Amiga was trying to start up again ... I agreed that I had heard the same thing, but not much had come from it. Are they going to have a release of Amiga OS for x86 peecees? Will they, or someone, be selling hardware any time soon?