Amiga, Inc. announced today that it has sold the Amiga Operating System to KMOS, Inc, allowing Amiga, Inc to focus on the growing mobile market. On April 23, 2003 Amiga entered into an Agreement with Itec LLC, later acquired by KMOS, Inc. for the transfer and sale of all of Amiga’s right, title, source code, and all versions, from the “Classic Amiga Operating System” through AmigaOS 4.0 and all subsequent versions to KMOS, Inc. The PR gives no explanation about the exact future of Amiga OS 4.
Amiga, Inc. Shifts Focus to AmigaDE; Sells Amiga OS
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The curse strikes again
another company, more hopes dashed another sell of
looks like a good time to get a pegasos……i hope amigaDE turns out better/sooner than OS4 did with amiga inc
comes around.
Hmm, I know Amiga Inc. didn’t have any problems with AROS.. I hope this new sell-off doesn’t cause any problems for them.
nt
So what happens next with AmigaOS 5? The OS that says it will be released soon but has never been released, looks like it never will even when amiga, inc owned all Amiga OS versions.
If I was an investor I wouldnt invest in Amiga, no offense
i mean version 4.0….. As for them trying to market this OS without the Amiga name.. good luck it will take AWHILE to do that. Zeta didnt catch on at first either-if it had the beOS name it would have grown fast. Zeta is just now getting out there.
Why can’t any company seem to get their act together when it comes to the Amiga… I’m dissapointed, I was looking forward to buying an AmigaOne when OS4 was ready to ship.
AmigaOS 4.0 will still be out for AmigaOne and development will be continued after that. No reason to get into foetal position.
Now there’s $$$ behind AmigaOS again.
Why do you think they would sell the AmigaOS4 intellectual property? Not for scraps or to throw it away, right? No, it’s to protect it. If they don’t have the money or the legal ability to protect the OS, selling it is the only thing to do.
Amiga Inc.’s slimming process seems the right way to me, to reduce itself to think tank and IP-provider and let other companies to the dirty work, as is done with OS4 and AmigaOne. Those companies have the expertise and the capacity to do the job.
Notice that it has no impact on the development or release schedule for OS4. Hyperion are still developing it, Amiga Inc. keeps the name and there shouldn’t be anything to worry about.
I’m thinking of getting an Amiga 600, and plug an IDE drive in it (2.5″). I am a bit disappointed with the floppy drive reliability.
Why is it bad news or the curse? Development of OS4 was not being handled by Amiga Inc anyhow, it was being developed by Hyperion.
I wonder how many times is this?
At this point, I am only worried about AROS — I believe that AmigaOS is a case study in one (of many reasons) good reason why open source is useful. If a product is abandoned (over and over and over), an open source work-alike can suffice, or possibly exceed, leaving users and potential users with a viable alternative. If only it was availiable immediately after Amiga Inc. stopped development on AmigaOS 3.x.
Erik
Wasn’t there another company with a fast, slick OS that went full force into “mobile devices” and then fell flat when it didn’t pan out? C-OS? D-OS? I know it ended with -os.. hmmn..
There was an interesting observation regarding the names of the ‘owners’ of the Amiga technology and how it revolved around the sequential use of odd-numbered letters from the English alphabet:
Amiga
B
Commodore
D
Escom
F
Gateway
Looks like it breaks down around there …H…I…J… And now we have:
KMOS (KLMNOPQRS)
Silly? Of course. Sillier than some of the other crazy stuff that’s been said about the Amiga’s complicated history? No way.
You just cannot trust a dying OS or a dying company. Good luck to all the Amiga Fans.
The sale of Amiga Inc’s AmigaOS rights is also announced by Hyperion, the company managing the development of AmigaOS4.
http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/_amiga/index.html
Some reactions and clarifications from core AmigaOS4 developers can be found at the AmigaWorld.net portal:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1304
IMO the deal holds much promise and my congratulations to Garry Hare and his team on acquiring Amiga Inc’s AmigaOS rights. 😎
Did reincarnation really exist? It seem false for Amiga, my childhood dream computer…
one question that no one has asked yet is, what about the people who purchased the subscription to the “club Amiga”. There was a promise from Bill McEwan that, Amiga inc. would honor the initial promise to give these people a free copy of AmigaOS 4.0….
IMO the deal holds much promise and my congratulations to Garry Hare and his team on acquiring Amiga Inc’s AmigaOS rights. 😎
You’re eternally optimistic, I’ll give you that Mike!
8)=
In Monty Python terms, this is the guy whacking the “I’m not dead yet” dude one with his hammer while John Cleese looks away.
Unless the new Amiga owners like owning intellectual property with a smaller user base than say the Timex Sinclair, I’d strongly urge them to consider open sourcing some of the Amiga code ASAP.
Unless there’s an open-sourcing, or an “accidental” release of the source in the Net, I can’t see the anything coming of the Amiga any longer.
When OS4 was announced I was skeptical, but watched closesly to see if Amiga could return from the dead. Now I’m sure they can’t. This is one more hammer in a already-overnailed’ coffin.
Even if they do release product in the future, this just assures that there will be few, if any developers there to support the platform with new or ported software. The Amiga owners have been so unreliable in the past that most developers have invested their time & efforts elsewhere.
This just assures that any programmers considering spending the time and effort neccesary to master a new platform will wisely spend it on a more profitable one.
An “oops” source code release could actually benefit the Amiga platform though. No one who’s in control of the Amiga code will likely have enough money to sue anyone exploiting the code, nor would they have the inclination to sue… Any development for the Amiga at this point will be beneficial, whether it’s based off leaked code or not.
And since it’d be an “accident”, there wouldn’t be any messy lawsuits from any who might still hold a stake in the code itself, for the new ownsers to fend off.
Just an idea…
Does anyone else find it odd that the announcement is nearly 11 months AFTER THE FACT?
I think Bill McEwen is in deep trouble now. A total violation to the recents court decision and now selling AmigaOS to KMOS is another violation to the courts decision who granted GENESI to use all the property. Not to mention the contract they had with Thendic Electronics (now GENESI) a couple of years ago.
Well there are many Soulbrothers who will have Bill McEwen pick up the soap in the showerroom pretty soon.
There’s always DragonFly BSD.
Funny thing about it, it’s more AmigaOS-like than this new-fangled thing that the Amiga folks were (until recently it appears) pushing, and it’s a BSD to boot. It’s a win-win situation!
I just woke up in the middle of the night and fired up the browser and read this. I thought that I was either dreaming or had somehow travelled back in time and to a paralell universe.
Anyway, this doesn’t seem as bad as the Be focus shift. Although I agree that the Amiga is somewhat cursed.
Wow, as a BeOS (Zeta) user, I feel that my choice of systems is more mainstream than Amiga. Weird.
Who was it that once said the compared to GNU/Hurd, BeOS is mainstream… Well I guess the same can be said for Amiga…
What else could be expected when Amiga Inc. produced no hardware or any software. Anyone can sit down
& dream up specifications for a theoretical Amiga PC & wait until (forever??) someone decides to produce
such a machine. Kudos to Eyetech for producing the Amiga-One & to Hyperion for working on AmigaOS 4.0
(for the last two years??). No one should have expected different results from such a silly business plan.
Jim Steichen, Author of AmigaTalk
> Kudos to Eyetech for producing the Amiga-One
Sorry but you are wrong. The people who produced the Amiga-One are MAI inc.
http://www.mai.com/
What you call the Amiga-One is just a plain Teron CX
http://www.mai.com/products/teron cx.htm
This was the dumbest move of the year, as far as computer OS companies go.
au revoir
–EyeAm
“Finger to the status quo!”
Just for you to learn:
Never trust someone who is talking a lot whereas there’s nothing.
Now it seems clear the only option is Morphos. Or you can wait till OS 4 ship. Maybe in fifty years
.
“Amiga
B
Commodore
D
Escom
F
Gateway
Looks like it breaks down around there …H…I…J… And now we have:
KMOS (KLMNOPQRS)”
Actually, it doesn’t brake down as you have the ‘I’ in Itec LLC. 🙂
DISCLAIMER: This comes from a sane person, mildly interested in Amiga OS due to nostalgic reasons and completely void of any zealotry towards or against Amiga, Inc., Genesi, or any other related company.
Fact: Amiga, Inc. does not develop Amiga OS 4. Hyperion Entertainment VOF does that. Amiga, Inc. has at most done some limited PR for Amiga OS 4 but other than that it’s been up to their partners Hyperion and Eyetech Ltd. to develop and push the _products_ AmigaOne and Amiga OS 4.0.
Question: What makes you think any of this would change now?
From a dispassionate, mildly interested and void of zealotry person to another: I am not even sure what is really going on here. There seem to be 2 or 3 new OS-es apparently contending for the position of successors of the Amiga kickstart/workbench. Also, there seem to be several hardware platforms, too.
Now I guess these various platforms offer differing levels of Amiga/68000 emulation. That’s the only thing I personally find important, as the whole point, I think, is to reuse the wealth of existing excellent Amiga software. A platform that wuld force you to start from scratch could as well be BeOS or QNX Neutrino.
As a person old enough for remembering playing with Amigas, I was looking forward to OS 4/AmigaOne.
Now it seems that it is one more stubbling block for the company.
I would really hope for them to get out of their troubles, but due to the Amiga history, I’m not that confident….
Curse: KMOS is yet another company without a clue and/or the resources for developing a usable desktop OS.
Bless: What we haven’t seen in the last decade.
I’m throwing the dices here :>
They sold the OS to KMOS. Now to which market segment are KMOS gonna sell it too? It’s still a product that no one needs and that is more expensive than a similar and more powerful Mac. The market itself already chose it’s new champion: Linux. The old niches market that the Amiga used to serve were filled by their competitors: Microsoft and Apple. Most Cell phones run on Java, most gamers have Windows and scientific community is embracing OSX. The multimedia community is stretched between MS, Apple and UNIX vendors.
1. Make new Amiga
2. ???
3. Profit
Amiga
Commodore
Escom
Gateway
Itec
KMOS
…
I don’t even know what the “M” and the “S” in that series would stand for… Mircosoft and SCO? Dear lord, no… 😀
Sorry for not having any serious to say, but I feel seriousness has left the Amiga building somewhere between 1996 (Walker prototype) and 2001 (AmigaOne announcement).
s/even know/even want to know/
“As a person old enough for remembering playing with Amigas, I was looking forward to OS 4/AmigaOne.
Now it seems that it is one more stumbling block for the company.”
Actually this is a solution to a problem which has been festering for a while. The Amiga Inc company was set up with investment to produce a totally new product (commonly called the DE), not to develop Amiga computers or the Amiga OS.
Those operations were licensed out to Eyetech & Hyperion, who will continue to do them under license from KMOS. This removes the threat that the Amiga OS would be messed up by some attempt to “integrate” Tao’s Intent into it.
Intent is a good system and can work well as a “content” player sitting on top of any OS, but “integration” would never have worked.
“They sold the OS to KMOS. Now to which market segment are KMOS gonna sell it too? It’s still a product that no one needs and that is more expensive than a similar and more powerful Mac. ”
There is no guarantee that Eyetech will succeed in selling lots of motherboards, but I don’t see it as impossible. The bigger the order, the lower the price will be.
Apple are not offering bare boards. The competition, if any, comes from Genesi; and surely the world is big enough for both Eyetech and Genesi to sell enough boards to make a prosperous business. If they keep their overheads low, both could do well.
Apple sell complete packaged computers in glamorous cases. The case designs are a strong part of their appeal. IMO this is a completely different market from what either Eyetech or Genesi are aiming at.
The one that says UNIX is a registered trademark of whoever bought it last?
If only AmigaOS had been around when they made that saying…
What you call the Amiga-One is just a plain Teron CX
According to both Mai and EyeTech, the AmigaOne is a modified version of teh Teron CX
http://www.mai.com/news&events/PressRelease070902_2.html
http://amiga.emugaming.com/eye_amyone.html
From another statement by Eyetech:
The new Eyetech AmigaOne design obviously shares a lot of commonality with the Teron Cx board, but more than a cursory glance at the specifications (ATA speed, integrated ethernet, custom firmware, number of active PCI/AGP slots etc) – and the price – of both boards should be enough to convince most people that they really are different designs.
However if you remain unconvinced you are of course perfectly welcome to purchase the Teron Cx evaluation board. It costs $3900, misses many features of the AmigaOneG3-SE, and won’t run OS4.
“Look, if you are a retro-computer nerd thats one thing, but if you see Amiga as a future product you are just wrong. The Amiga was a good system years ago. It was ahead of it’s time, but to see it as a modern viable platform…it will never be. It is time to move on. We 64 bit CPUs, Gigabit ethernet, Video cards that have more processing power than whole systems did just a couple of years ago.”
There are not many 64-bit OSes on sale right now. There is no reason why there should not be Amiga hardware with 9xx CPUs in a year or so, as Apple already have them. The delay is due to the lack of a suitable chipset – Apple design their own.
As for the OS, it isn’t going to be easy to convert any 32-bit OS to 64-bit, but AmigaOS stands as good a chance as any of being converted to a 64-bit SASOS. It is SAS already, unlike some. I think this is a matter for about 5 years ahead, though.
Gigabit ethernet is a purely hardware feature and will surely appear on Amiga motherboards. Why wouldn’t it?
3D graphics card drivers for the latest cards are being worked on. 2D drivers come with SNAP.
i think the lesson here is that open source is the only business model that works for alternative operating systems that seek to address the desktop. Apple, who makes their own hardware and is well established, is the exception.
This is why i am fan of OBOS and why i think yellowtab should really switch to being an obos distributor when it comes around.
Well well well, fate strikes again. I guess this is probably about the 5th time now that the Amiga has slipped through the fingers of those who try to posess it. Be free Amiga, be free!
I am wondering as to the phsychological momentum behind this long trail of twists and turns. It makes one think that perhaps we are in two minds. On the one hand maybe people really worship AmigaOS and put it high on a pedestal, but then on the other hand perhaps by doing this they place it out of reach to all who attempt to exploit it.
The Amiga sure remains elusive and mysterious.
I always felt that the miggy had a mysterious, mystical side to it. I don’t really feel as though, after its glory days, anyone was really prepared to keep it evolving. It was so loved in the form it was in at the time that people really don’t want it to change. I think that is another contraditiction of focusses… wanting it to stay the same but trying to do something new with it.
I see all this frustration and these repeating patterns of self sabotage and wonder why people think it’s such a surprise. When the Amiga first was growing it was new and its evolution was great. They came out with new improved versions with added coolness and new vision. This was expansion. But then the guts fell out of it, the vision, the evolution. Then everyone has been trying to keep `alive` this static system in the way it was remembered whilst simultaneously complaining that it isn’t being updated. We can’t have our cake and eat it. Our motivation as a community is split and self contradicting. Our focus is divided with different incompatible interests.
I find it no wonder that the Amiga phenomenon continues dwell in a limbo of coming and going. It is testimony to the power of our collective manifestational choices. The Amiga is dying because the SPIRIT behind it is dying, the vision, the beauty, the spirituality. There isn’t enough energy behind it, it isn’t fresh enough or renewed enough. Amiga long ago became just a financial commodity for people to exploit and make some money off. Without realising that, those people have sunk with it.
If the Amiga is truly going to come back and survive we are all going to have to admit to our mixed messages and focus on the positive support and excitement for the future of this platform. That means we have to be open to evolving this OS, not keeping it a retro-novelty. Things evolve to be able to tell they are alive. Without some change there can be no long term success. I don’t think people have put a finger on what really made Amiga good – it was the spirit and enthusiasm and community behind everything, supporting it energetically. IT doesn’t come down to the form of the OS nor the cool hardware. Those are just expressions of that spirit. We are all getting lost in our creations instead of continuing the creative process.
With so many crossed wires in our minds it is no surprise at all to me that the Amiga and its community are so drenched in confusion and frustration. To truly revive the Amiga we must get honest with ourselves, stop contradicting our own creative manifestations and express a vision. All this `lets keep alive the way it was` is completely incompatible with the natural reality of things.
I hope this isn’t too abstract or wierd sounding. I just see that there are REASONS why things keep going the way they do, and this is my stab at what those reasons are.
Long live the Amiga spirit.
Paul
As soon as I read this article, I felt sick. This sounds alot like what Be inc. did in the end. I only hope this other company won’t be like Palmsouce and scrap the os for parts.
I agree ! There are no space for another proprietary operating system today. Age of Sinclairs, Amigas, Ataris, Commodores, OS/2, BeOS, etc ended.
The world is now polarized in Windows and open source OSes (linux the most popular of them). MacOS X is still an exception but your market share is stagnant bacause it depends on proprietary and expensive hardware sales.
I quote: “There is nothing to evolve or keep alive as the Amiga OS is a relic and there is no open source code. There is no Amiga OS to keep alive.”
You really missed my point. Even the Amiga could be `brought back to life` if there was enough of a shift in our focus, a clarification of what kind of signals we’re putting out to the universe about it, and a more coherent attitude about what we perceive the Amiga to be. Even the `near-to-death` Amiga could be brought back to life. But it’s not going to make it just because a bunch of people add stuff or make it run on modern hardware. That isn’t enough. There has to be more fuelling it to push it way beyond current limits so that it has an INFLUENCE ON other things.
The Amiga’s original success opened and led the way for all kinds of other innovations in software and hardware, products that people could sell, software that people would want to use. Just look at the success of the Amiga demo scene – all those people ENABLED to express themselves creatively as they moved to fill the creative space provided by the Amiga. Amiga held open the doors. The Amiga will have to again hold open some doors and push aside limits in order to be in a similar position.
I was just trying to say that Amiga is in the state it is in because of our collective attitude about it and the lack of vision or inspiration. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t get that back.
PAul
I also wholeheartedly agree with the guy that suggested the Amiga as a movement would survive and thrive far more interestingly and securely if it were free software that anyone can modify and redistribute. All of the years of experiencing this barrier between myself and Amiga’s proprietary activities, behind closed doors, inaccessible, has just made the case all the more powerful in favor of free software or at least open sourced software. I think the open source movement has sprung up out of the massive proprietary acitivities of Microsoft and other companies and the Amiga too is being held back by people who want to own it and profit from it. Fleecy and the rest of them are more interested in making money but maybe, in their defence, they were not in a position to continue the Amiga development and have given it to someone who might at least see it survive a while longer. The Amiga sure seems to have 9 lives.
It seems, however, that the Amiga keeps falling into smaller and smaller hands. Each time the owning company has less and less resources. How long is it going to be before some drooling bedroom programmer is going to end up buying the last trinkets of the era?
I really loved my Amiga days and they are fond memories, but every corporate interest has successfully killed off the spirit of the Amiga platform, left only in a few die-hard-super-hard fans. I still love and respect the platform but the kind of freedoms made possible by a system as eloquent and beautiful as the Amiga should not be bottled up and exploited companies trying to buy into and profit from it exclusively. The Amiga would be far more honored by being released openly and freely, than constantly dragged through nails and thorns by all these profiteers. Amiga always belonged to the people and still should.
Paul
I personally think Amiga users today fall into two camps; those that reminisce about the Amiga’s glory days and those that see a real future for the Amiga.
I think the former are well served by either UAE or for the purists purchasing existing Amiga hardware from eBay.
The latter I believe should flock to the AROS project. At long last the Amiga community have control over their platform, a platform which has the best hope for taking the spirit of Amiga forward. I can see AROS becoming for Amiga what Linux is for Unix, a free and open alternative, in which its fate and direction is determined by its users and the Amiga community.
AROS I believe has great potential, and offers the greatest hope in keeping the Amiga spirit alive today.
AROS is a very good project. MorphOS is also a very good project.
For your former crowd, the best product would be Amithlon.
I don’t think releasing the AmigaOS sources would do any good. Too different are the opinions on the paths to take (P96 vs. CGX, MUI vs. Reaction, n different toolbar apps, …) – not even speaking about the much deeper chasm between the “hardware niche” vs. “mainstream hardware” camps.
Too few the developers that still care and can (especially the latter). Too far behind the code base.
You might say that diversity in approaches works for Linux (KDE vs. Gnome), but even Linux feels the severe pain of the chasm in only this *one* diversity – let alone several of them, and in a “market” that counts by the hundreds, not by the millions.
An opening of the AmigaOS sources would only serve for three things: some insight in how they did it in the eighties, some nostalgia, and a couple dozen happy tinkerers just like those still patching their C64’s.
You seem to see the KDE vs Gnome thing as a weakness. There is no pain here, but a good natured rivalry that yields up tons of innovation. That is why both KDE and Gnome are top quality environments. If you open sourced Amiga it would split into competing factions producing numerous versions of the OS. This means that competition led innovation would arise. Instead of one you would have many choices. This is Linux’ greatest strength. It is whatever you want it to be. A standardised Linux distro would mean death to the system.It would stagnate rapidly. Diversity is always good.
>AROS is a very good project. MorphOS is also a very good
project.
>
>For your former crowd, the best product would be Amithlon.
And why should the original be a bad thing? At least the OS4 I have on my AmigaOne machine(s) is more complete than any of the others…
(compared to all OS services the others provide: e.g. tcp/ip, gui, user level tools (e.g Installer!) etc). And even better than Amithlon, because this uses OS3.x services only, while OS4 also has new features compared to _previous_ version (e.g. AmigaInput, Warp3D)
Why do you think this product will not hit the streets ?
None of the others is available yet (or still), neither (maybe MorphOS if they manage to produce machines again).
I think a lot of people misunderstood the concequences of
this announcement. To cite from the comment available
on Hyperion’s Webpage:
”
We welcome the acquisition of the AmigaOS intellectual property by KMOS. Together with KMOS, Hyperion looks forward to exploring new business opportunities for AmigaOS 4. I would like to reassure all our customers that the acquisition by KMOS will not have any adverse impact whatsoever on the release of the consumer version of AmigaOS 4.0 later this year.” said Evert Carton, managing partner of Hyperion Entertainment VOF.
”
So it is in no means a step backward. And no, OS 4 development did not stop in any way, not even a slowdown.
Development is being done right now.
Here is a answer from Ben Hermans if the sale to KMOS would
have any impact on the soon-to-be-expected OS 4 Prerelease:
”
No, the KMOS acquisition of AmigaOS has no impact on our immediate plans.
Essentially, KMOS is just replacing Amiga Inc. as a contracting partner.
”
Basically: The acquisition by KMOS is good news for
people wanting Amiga OS 4.
And yes, I have OS 4 Beta running on my AmigaOne since months already, so it is a real (even if not fully
finished) product and not “vapor” in any way. It
was also shown to the public on many occasions in the
past months.
And to all those whining about “let the Amiga die” or “the Amiga is outdated hardware”: Please get some information
before you post. This is NOT about some old A500, this
is about recent hardware (Yes, a PowerPC usually has
smaller MHz numbers, but you cannot directly compare
the speed of different CPU-families by comparing their
MHz… this is only valid inside the same CPU-family).
I say to the “Let the Amiga die whining guys”, opposed to this: “Let Windows die. It is worse than ever.”
To the guy who argued that PCs can use recent GFX Cards
and such… what tells you AmigaOne’s cannot ?
Again:
We are *not* talking about the A500. Well, everytime
Amiga comes into the news some people who do not have
ANY idea about recent Amiga Development feel the need
to comment without first checking at least the most
basic facts. If I comment on something I don’t have a
clue about I at least do some google-research before
I write my comment, so that I am not totally off
from reality. Some guys appearently don’t
Steffen
I have hope for AROS. Like many people here I had an Amiga back in the day. When I heard about OS4 I was excited. Then the delays, then more delays. Even though is going to be on PowerPC, it is WAY, WAY over priced and I will not spend that much money for it. Not to mention that after all the things with AInc and now yet another sale I just don’t trust a coperate verison of AmigaOS. So AROS is a work alike that is moving along at a good pace recently. It also looks like it might be able to run the old Amiga software in a manner that is pretty seamless for the user, though not completely seamless from the OS standpoint. If only the Amiga community would get behind AROS. Anyway my 2cents.
I’ve said it many times and if this is taken as flamebait or a rant then so be it. I’m an old school ex-amiga user so I got a right to complain.
Amiga was done when Commodore went under. Anyone who didn’t see it then was blind. Anyone who dosen’t see it now is blind.
Nothing but broken promises, missed ship dates and a lot of hot air.
This all strikes me as another Be Inc. type drop off the map. Dump development on the desktop OS and throw all chances to the wind on some portable OS for set top boxes and handhelds. Maybe when this last gasp fails they’ll even sue MS!
The amiga was the best platform I ever owned but the worst investment in a computer and company I ever made.
Buh Bye Amiga.
I don’t agree that opening Amiga sources would have no effect. It absolutely would. There are a lot of people obviously who have been waiting for a long time to get their hands on new Amiga OS software. Even the software as it stands to date for OS4. If they released it openly there would be a lot of interested people wanting to work on it, to use it in various creative ways and to improve on it at a probably much faster and enthusiastic pace than the proprietary people are doing. It would open the Amiga up for more innovation and much quicker updates. The Amiga would grow and be freed to change. People who wanted to keep it the same could keep it the same, and people who wanted changes can change it of opt for other people’s changes also. There are many reasons why opening the source is beneficial to breathe new life into a product. What’s the betting a lot of people would drop their current projects and start working on Amiga OS enhancements if it were released freely.
I also agree that the other Amiga-like projects, AROS, MorphOS and the others are interesting avenues for the continuation of the Amiga spirit.
Paul, z1xq… how many startup open source projects have you been *directly* involved with?
Even the AROS team spend over a year spinning around in a tight discussion cycle going *nowhere* before they settled to the least common denominator – reimplementing 1994 AmigaOS v3.1, which AFAIK they are still busy with.
Again, the Amiga market – even counting in every *potential* developer who might be in a mind of returning to the once-beloved platform – doesn’t amount to, say, the people working on Mozialla Firebird.
And not only would they have to come up with a browser (after implementing the tcp/ip stack to go with the OS, instead of relying on a third-party plugin), they also need an e-mail client, an office suite, a new desktop, a media player…
Now you could go forth and say, “why don’t they take Firebird, KMail, OpenOffice, KDE, and MPlayer?” – then I’d ask you, where would be the point in using *AmigaOS*, instead of, say, Linux?
If what you say about innovative competition is true, why does AmigaOS still not have a web browser fully capable of JavaScript, Flash, and CSS 2 – AmigaOS has *three* of them, plenty of innovative competition if you ask me.
Wake up. Open Source “works” only if there are enough people, and Linux plus assorted projects pretty much sucks them all up. Go ask the developers of *really* alternative OS’es. Most of them are working on their own, or with teams of 2-3 people at best. Go ask them, they’re only two clicks away. They’ll tell you how OSS “works” these days if you don’t have a big name and a big code base to start with.
And Amiga just isn’t big enough anymore.
Can anyone say BeIA? Can you hear that? I keep hearing “…another one bites the dust…”
Yep, this is a great time to get into the mobile market, what with all the consolidation and stuff going on. I sure hope they have one heck of a niche in mind, because there is only room for niche players now.
Who is the guy running around to all the OS companies and convincing them that this is a huge market opportunity? I think we need to send him to SCO: Openserver for your PDA/cell phone/internet appliance. Maybe they’d quit harassing Linux companies.
I see the contrary.
Lately (the last year or so) there has been a small flood of new Amiga users. Some just getting an A1200 and wanting to play with that and they then tend to get curious regarding OS4.
I have no idea why this is the case, but it is. And it’s a good thing obviously.
AmigaOS 4 is also a very nice OS already in its beta form. Can’t wait to see the finished product.
The thing I find most fascinating about the Amiga phenomenon is that we are STILL here talking about it even though it is supposedly dead. Even when it is dead we are still attached to it. … not saying that I personally think it is dead, because for some people it isn’t, but you know what I mean.
In its heyday we were so enamored with it and formed a close relationship with it. I remember feeling such tremendous enthusiasm and excitement, had so much fun, expressed so much creativity and learned so much. There are emotional bonds tied into that and I think it is that emotional relationship to Amiga’s that people are reluctant to let go of. Some hard-headed insensitive people clamp down with hard-edged commentary about how Amiga is all dead and we’re all losers and so on, but because the Amiga ever had a spirit AT ALL is what enamored so many people to be loyal to it – or at least to want to be.
I don’t think that an operating system has to be mainstream or successful in the public eye or commercial or proprietary in order to be useful to some people and a great joy for them. If that’s what they want then that’s what they are allowed to have. I don’t think it’s right to try to kill off every last vestige and memory and user of the Amiga just to totally wipe it out and make a clean break if you so choose. So the market is greatly reduced, that doesn’t mean certain individuals aren’t allowed to continue their Amiga spirit if they so wish. And that is none of our business.
I don’t think it’s right that a certain facet of the Amiga world (or outside of it poking in) should be trying to force all Amigan’s to change or to give up or spewing out all this diatribe of complaint and `my os is better than your os` stuff. The Amiga STILL has its positive uses, is still capable in some fields in ways that other systems aren’t, is still popular with some individuals and still is a great system to use. I don’t see that there needs to be any of the malicious sour grapes or the `youre so wrong` attitudes. Let people do what they choose.
I’m not currently an Amiga user, since I had to sell my system in order to immigrate. I currently use Mac OSX Panther on an iMac/iLamp and iBook/iFlap. It’s an okay system, has some nice functionality, some nice support, but it’s not my ideal and I often still find myself yearning for the Amiga experience. Such a shining light, the Amiga has touched our hearts and will for a long time be a continued platform in some shape or form.
I would love a good Amiga emulator for my Sony Ericsson phone. It even got a joystick! Together with a lot of old and good games I could spend some serious time with my phone…
That’s the first time I see an annoucement like this without any mention of money: strange…
btw, when asked about they will be cooperation between A,Inc. and “KMOS”, got no answer…
“KMOS” seems to be a ghost company…
Are they so mad that they created a company for one symbolic dollar just to transfer the OS ?
Amiga “compatablility with older software” is dead. UAE should be the only focus for this (even stuff that don’t need custom chip).
Here is what something that could have the amiga name should be.
A COMPUTER, not an OS, that is made on the consol model of low upgradability and simultaneous 5-6 year launch of new model (commodore did not failed with the model itself, they failed at indroducing it in form evolved enough to 1-keep up with the PC world and 2-to offer stuff really impossible with the previous generation of their product).
The computer need to come back to the old price model of 2000$ with no monitor, but at that price pack so much under the hood that it’s worth it in the long run.
It need to have standard component but not standard technology. That mean it should have FPGA, DSP, Voxel graphic chip, cross matrix BUS etc…
Any company that would try to build the “computer” and the OS at the same time will fail. Let the OS being develloped OSS and make money on the hardware. Then put a fraction of those profit to fund OSS dev of project that are worth it.
If this is not your target, don’t even bother with wanting to do a new amiga.
I don’t want to say bad things about morphOS or aros, it’s just that for me they are nice alternative but NO amiga.
the problem is, people don’t want an real alternative. if you think microsoft is an extreme example of an monopolist, think again and have a view on the legal history of ibm.
so just install linux and pretend you wan’t alternatives.
everytime I hear or read about the Amiga with respect to computers, my eyes roll and the mind turns off.
Long die the Amiga! Should’ve been put out to pasture or open source a long eon ago.
Commie-dore killed off a once great platform and now it has been copied and superceded many times over. Just let the platform die and move on, please…
BeOS should’ve been the successor but alas the Microsoft steamroller keeps moving on.
You don’t know what’ll happen now with the OS. The other company can develop it futher. Why wouldn’t they?
This selling is especially important because Amiga is in high depts and might not last for long. This piece of software means it won’t die after the company is flushed, it means the company has some money instead now, it means the company might continue to exist.
Same with Maya / SGI though SGI is in less trouble.
I don’t know if this is a trend, purely logical, or common. Perhaps it is worth investigating is.
It all sounds like legal manipulations to me…
only read bits and peices of the story but enough to realize its nothing that is going to change the consumer accessable (not) status of the technology. And this should be obvious to anyone who can do simple math.
When I think I couldn’t care less… I find that I can and do.
Thanks to AROS there is a genuine viable available option to this manipulation tragedy of Amiga technology.
The timing of the company establishments (Itec LLC and KMOS, which acquired Itec) suggests that they were in fact set up for the express purpose of transferring IP from Amiga, Inc. Who is behind the new companies, apart from Garry Hare, whose name has been mentioned, remains to be seen, as do their intentions.
As has been pointed out, it’s unlikely that AmigaOS in its current form is particularly attractive to otherwise uninvolved investors or tech companies. This suggests some kind of ownership shuffling for legal reasons involving the current investors.
And how this transfer could have been made but not disclosed in depositions to the Washington State court concerning Amiga, Inc.’s assests is another interesting question.
The melodrama continues. 🙂
— gary_c
I remember meeting Bill M. back when they just formed Amiga Inc. Hopes of a MMC (Mystery Monster Chip), a multiplatform OS unbound by processor but using a translation layer that was only the size of a basic html page.
But now Amiga turns the page to what can be dubbed “pulling a BE”. OUCH!
I had my share of Amiga Events. Dwindeling boths, old dust boards for $500.
“Parting is such sweet sorrow” 🙁
I cannot believe what posts here get moderated down. Geee. And yes, Amiga is dead, it’s dead because there is no superb cheap non-intel platform with killer os and apps. And that’s what Amiga stands for it’s former users, we don’t give a fuck who’s producing it.
Regards,
Karel Miklav
I wos worried that when AOS sales would be financing AInc debts for years to come (a little bit like Amiga was the only real money bringer for CBM when they made loss on PC sales in early 90’s). Now AOS is free from all that.
-aboxb
(Amiga fan since 1987)
[Quote]i think the lesson here is that open source is the only business model that works for alternative operating systems that seek to address the desktop. Apple, who makes their own hardware and is well established, is the exception.
This is why i am fan of OBOS and why i think yellowtab should really switch to being an obos distributor when it comes around. [/quote]
You are kiding right. A fan of OBOS……a product that doesnt exist. Ahh, Yellowtab being an OBOS distrubuter, Im sure the ‘good will’ pays the bills.
OSS has advantages. I am sure there are OSS advocates who do not make foolish statments like this. All OS’s should not be OSS – you tool.
“I remember meeting Bill M. back when they just formed Amiga Inc. Hopes of a MMC (Mystery Monster Chip), a multiplatform OS unbound by processor but using a translation layer that was only the size of a basic html page.”
The MMC was simply talk about the future AGP graphics cards, the ones people are using now. The point was that new hardware would allow design of a new Amiga with better graphics than the old.
This was talked about loudly at one point to cover a hiatus when a proposed alliance with Be fell through just before a big Amiga show at which it was to be announced.
The “multiplatform OS” is Tao’s Intent, which seems to be developing steadily. The Amiga DE is a customisation of Intent.
The Amiga project is not dead, KMOS = Amiga Inc. the same company, same strategies
AmigaOne/OS4 there is no change
I find myself agreeing with both sides of the open source coin here…. I can see that from one perspective the Amiga seems to be near-death, radically reduced from its original prime and struggling to survive in a popular world. I can also see that some people are perfectly content with what they have and have no real reason to jump ship. I think both are entirely valid. It’s when we start trying to say that it has to be one or the other that conflict begins. And yes I am sitting on a fence here. How uncommittal of me! 🙂
I still do think that an open sourced Amiga OS would be a really great thing for the Amiga. On the other hand I guess that it still must have some market value in some form in order for this long string of companies to keep investing in it. Has the Amiga become a wolf in sheeps cloathing?
When we say the Amiga is dead I think we’re saying that so much of the commercial support and user base is missing. All the fuss has died down. The platform itself hasn’t suffered any kind of death or destruction, it’s only its impact and popularity that have been reduced.
Having not used an Amiga for 4 years I still find it interesting to keep up with this news and keep an eye on what’s going on in the Amiga world. Why is that? So much “if only” and wishful thinking. It’s a system that really does have merit and really deserves to be taken to new heights. The question is when is that going to happen and who is going to make it happen. Perhaps open sourcing it is the answer. I really, really, really hope that Hyperion finish OS4.0 and even proceed beyond that and actually get that puppy released.
But part of me can’t help but wonder if the real business now isn’t a matter of marketing the Amiga but of how best to exploit the dimished user base for the last pennies that it is worth. They operate more with more `post surgery care` than performing radical operations. And maybe this is all a necessary part of the healing process, healing the loss of a once amazing platform.
Yes, I agree the Amiga has dwindled, the market shrivveled, the user base declined, and a lot of needy, creative people moved on, but there is still a little bit of that momentum left, a little of the flame ignited. The Amiga isn’t quite ashes yet, more like a smouldering with a few sparks. Who can breathe new life into it, is the big question. Either way, someone has to do something to cross the barrier between those who own the system and those who use the system. So long as the Amiga is hidden behind a corporate wall it will continue to shrivvel up and die, emprisoned with no escape. They HAVE to get the product out. If they don’t, it really is going to be a continued bye bye Amiga.
Notice how after originally stating that the Amiga OS4 was going to be likely released `just after christmas` or in the new year, they are now saying that it will be released `later this year`. 2005 anyone? They have changed the release date despite stating that the project would not be in any way affected. Oh well.
Quite frankly this to me is all an exercise in learning that proprietary interests are selfish and continue to keep the gems of human creativity from being shared openly and freely. The Amiga’s suffering behind closed doors in the hands of greedy companies is what has been killing it off. It has no life because it cannot roam free, not even in proprietary form yet alone any other. The real questions being raised here are as to the philosophical errors being made by these posessive companies. Hyperion should release OS4 and make their money from support services. Who will free the Amiga from its limits?
That sound the same when Gateway adquire the Amiga assets. Excellent technology, good patents, full support. But at the end they keep the patents, sell the rest. Probably OS 4 will not be affected due to previous contracts, but the real doubt is the support for post 0S 4 development.
Anyway, was a good OS some years ago, but it can’t stand a chance in features with todays OS’s like Linux, Windows or Mac OS X.
Mario said: Anyway, was a good OS some years ago, but it can’t stand a chance in features with todays OS’s like Linux, Windows or Mac OS X.
This might be correct in all but one aspect: simplicity. By reading two books you could turn Amiga around your finger – by reading only two books about wins or unix you’re a total looser.