Good interview with Steven Solie - this bit stood out to me: "Although Hyperion has been using serial numbers for copies of AmigaOS since 4.0, it won't reveal sales numbers. Solie's 'personal guess' is that the system has 2000-5000 users. 'If you include all the various Amiga clones and emulators we would probably be talking about around 10000 users [in] total,' he adds, 'it is really difficult to judge because a majority of the users are rather quiet.'" Fascinating number - lower than I anticipated.
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Member since:2009-03-27
Member since:2010-03-08
I just hope we will never have to find out.
Like that at some point, when people start to actually get hit by the side effects of today's massive hardware lockdown wave, the European commission will finally beat up Microsoft for a good reason, deal with the secure boot issue themselves, and introduce an EU-wide ban on locked bootloaders for all personal computer OEMs as a side effect. Best possible outcome, IMO.
Edited 2012-06-02 13:20 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Hm, Amiga now is not so much about openness (come on, this flavour is essentially locked by design into a limited range of hardware!*), but IMHO about being a bit of a slave captured into ones own nostalgia - which makes you vulnerable to almost-extortion by some marginal companies.
So the dynamics are a bit different, I'd guess.
* And at least historically being also a bit hostile to another kind of openness, open source software (funny how most software titles which actually make it semi-useful for modern daily usage ...are ports of PC OSS stuff).
Overall, I would be a bit surprised by higher range of the estimated number of users. We're talking about a platform which for 1.5+ decade was working quite hard to make itself irrelevant, putting more and more nails into its coffin - it really seems like it was mostly about few companies riding on nostalgia of old users, to sell their silly hardware for exorbitant prices...
(you know what was the one killer feature of real Amigas? Great bang per buck)
...while "even" Macs as the platform to target would be much more sensible, if they insisted on PPC.
Then there's Amithlon, by far the fastest Amiga at the time (and most likely still, if it continued on and could run on present PC hardware). It even offered smooth migration route, IIRC (applications, libraries compiled into x86 code running alongside 68k ones).
But no, Intel was evil, and ~"Apple chooses the superior PPC" (funny how that turned out in the end)
(yes, Amithlon had some issues with its licensing or such - but let's be honest here, it was mostly about killing it as a competition; and anyway, OS4 was also embroiled in a legal uncertainty for a long time)
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Member since:
2010-03-08
Could this be a reliable evaluation of the amount of people across the world who will use open computing devices when everything else has acquired locked bootloaders ?
After all, the process for acquiring an AmigaOS-compatible machine is similar to the one for an Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or Pandaboard : you have to know that it exists, fiddle around in obscure websites to find it, pay money to a semi-trusted reseller without having seen the hardware yet, then fiddle around with a bare PCB (be careful with electrostatic discharges !) in order to install your OS in a hardware-specific way...