Slashdot Mirror
Amiga and Hyperion Settle Ownership of AmigaOS
HKcastaway writes "Amiga Inc and Hyperion Entertainment announced a settlement over ownership and licensing over AmigaOS 4.0 and future versions. Since the bankruptcy of Commodore, Amiga's history has been littered with lawsuits that have affected the development of Amiga hardware and software. Having a lawsuit-free OS probably will help a great deal to the continuity and recovery of the Amiga heritage. Hyperion also provides AmigaOS SDKs for developers.'
There is little good in them coming out of their litigation.
Winding back the clock a little, Amiga Inc came out of the broken bones of the old Amiga organisation. They came up with some plans, most of which broke down.
What they did do, was ally themselves up in an evil triumverate, with two other companies.
Amiga Inc, Hyperion, and a third company, Eyetech.
These three cooked up a goofy plan to ship a half baked OS, on severely half baked PPC hardware, so broken it became an in joke. The worst lunatics in the 'community' bandwagoned this complete junk, and the vast majority of people who fell for it, paid a lot of money for over priced junk. The warranty was worthless. A great many people walked away during this time, and a great deal of friction arose because of these antics.
The fact that two of these were killing themselves through litigation led to a hope they might destroy themselves, if for no other reason than they be denied the ground to sell their next 'release' on the unwise, the ill educated, or the stupid.
Putting that aside, its hard to consider Amiga OS, and the hardware choices are appallingly bad (unless you like crippled and old PPC equipment tied to old junk from the PC world) - so unless this 'new' start comes up with very serious improvements in every area, including warranty and support, and merchantable quality in their goods and services, and decent, reasonably priced hardware, then there is no reason for them to even exist. And on past events, they don't deserve to.
I've looked at that and similar systems for a while now, but honestly, I just can't justify that sort of price premium. In all reality if they had wanted to spur adoption, then they should have built it for plain-jane x86 hardware. No need to support everything under the sun - hell just approve a specific combination of hardware as a reference platform and go from there (for non-gaming applications there are several motherboards where the whole of everything a user would need is right there on the board, making testing easy).
I mean, honestly, $550+ for a motherboard/cpu that would have been fast-ish about 8 years ago (and is only good for an Amiga), versus ~$125 for an x86 motherboard/cpu that's several times faster and can be used for any other OS if I decide that AmigaOS isn't for me?
That's a pretty easy decision, and the results don't favor the Amiga.
Truthfully, if I wanted to play with a vaguely Amiga-inspired OS I'd try Syllable before going for the official AmigaOS these days.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Yes, it would be "in development" until 2015, and then released to practically nobody, who would promptly sue.
I've ceased to be excited by the "potential" of any hardware platform. The history of technology is littered with a lot of potentially great things that failed to do anything remotely great.
If you wanted to sum up Apple's recent successes, it would be "they delivered." Apple didn't promise the world, they merely delivered a continent or two. Here's a product: you can do these things with it.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.