Money, money, money
Must be funny
In the rich man's world
Money, money, money
Always sunny
In the rich man's world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do
If I had a little money
It's a rich man's world

Quote:

How's that 4-license pack for 400 € offer going?

(me ducks)

Not at all infact I dont believe in money

You can get Powermac G4's for like 30 GBP but purchasing a code to use MOS2 on each one is ridiculous haha

If they allow 4 computers I might get one until then........

Para

@paradoxportal,

Can you legally buy one copy of Windows, or MacOSX and install and use it on 4 PC's or Mac computers (legally)? No! Why would you expect to buy one copy of MorphOS and be able to use it on 4 PowerMac computers or any other computers?

Just because the license copy protection is more effective and implemented differently than any other OS, it does not make it wrong or different in it's purpose, which is to prevent pirating of their hard work.

And just because you can buy used Apple hardware cheaply, that fact has no bearing or effect on what the price of a MorphOS license should be. It does not make the OS worth less just because the developers were smart enough to port MorphOS to cheap and powerful used hardware that is widely available.

[ Edited by amigadave on 2009/12/19 11:04 ]

@ amigadave

Actually, David, Apple and Microsoft offer special 'family packs' that allow private buyers to install MacOS and Windows on multiple machines (5 and 3, I believe) as long as they are part of the same household.

With regard to MorphOS, it is more likely that development is stopped and everybody gets a free key than this being implemented, however. The current licensing scheme was chosen because of its low administrative overhead. 'One price for all' is really as simple as it gets.

@amigadave

I bought a family pack of Leopard with iWorks and iLife, that's 5 licenses for 5 computers for less that one MorphOS keyfile.

I did have to shop around a bit, but...


[ Edited by stephen_robinson on 2009/12/19 20:06 ]

see!

actually with a normal vista pack you can install on 4 computers ask microsoft!

any morphOS should be free as its bounty based.

Regards

"bounty based"? You just made my day, mate... Yes, there do exist some bounties (too few, I think) here and there, but I wouldn't dare to say that MorphOS is more "bounty based" than i.e. OS4.x.

@paradoxportal

You seem somewhat confused, you may want to do a little fact checking, but why don't you share with us what you would do with MorphOS on four computers?

You should pay *one* fee and install it on anything that becomes availble for and get updates

hehe love the aphex twin avatar

I WANT YOUR SOUL! for FREE TOO!

The 6th root race came early

[ Edited by paradoxportal on 2009/12/21 23:07 ]

[ Edited by paradoxportal on 2009/12/21 23:45 ]

Quote:

Yes, but was it cheaper, or the same price as the best price you could pay for just one MacOSX Leopard license? I would bet it was more.

Until the MorphOS Development Team decides to change their "One Size Fits All" pricing as ASiegel put it, the MorphOS family pack will only cost you as much as 150 euros times the number of computers you want to put it on.

The point is, MorphOS is to much for those of us with multiple machines that want to use it. As mentioned before it's the only thing keeping myself and many others from making the purchase. When it comes out for power macs I may do it if it supports the pci slots like it was a Pegasos though. As for my mini, it's a toy and no way would I lock it to it for that kind of money.

@Acill,

I understand. The licensing scheme is not ideal for the users, but I guess it is the best fit for the Development Team, as it is one form of strong anti-piracy protection and the way it is set up, it is very low maintenance for them as most of it is automated.

Perhaps if someone could invent a better way for the team to protect their hard work to replace the method that now ties the license to the hardware, and then convince the team to use it instead, we could have a system where we could move our MorphOS license from one machine to another. In a perfect World the team would not need to protect their work from pirates, but alas, we do not live in a perfect World.

I know that many think the answer is just to lower the price, instead of trying to figure out a better license mechanism, but I don't know if or when that will ever happen and personally, I don't mind the price too much, even on my limited income. I think that we have to realize the amount of work that has gone into it and the small reward the team gets back in return, due to the tiny size of the user base. If the user base can help increase the number of users, we may be helping ourselves by giving the Development Team more incentive to lower the price.

So, I will be willing to purchase one more license for a G4 PowerMac when it is released if, as you say, it supports most of the hardware features of the PowerMac, like the PCI slots, Ethernet NIC, etc. As I have said before, I would much rather have MorphOS support the G5 PowerMac, so it could be more useful as a dual boot, or triple boot machine running MacOSX and perhaps Linux, but that will have to wait for another time, if it ever happens, so I will be happy with what we have now and not worry about what is going to happen with MorphOS in the future.

Wish to have the new version with PowerMac Support for the Christmas holidays where there is sitll enough free time to play with it :)

@Amigadave the user base will never grow with the current pricing and hardware lock model. In fact I'm willing to bet it's gotten smaller in the terms of dedicated users.

I was a very dedicated user before 2.0 was released, to the point of funding my own trip to amiwest to show off 1.4 and one of the first peg 2 machines here in the west coast. I convinced several people to switch to morphos, did demos of hardware at frys electronics, an several other small electronics stores.

It took all of one hour on 2.0 to decide the new release was not worth it and the team was alienating those of us that busted our asses to help spread the word without a single thank you. So live your dream in dream land and keep shoving cash at them. Slowly the platform is going to die as those few left get fed up with it and come to realize that the few developers porting rehashed software from code older then dirt and no new ones making a showing is all they get.

I just hope you behave the same with apple (for instance) for each of their paying updates.

You keep shoving cash at them too, and yet they never thank you for all your money. :(

@thread

I read a couple of HW-related posts here.

After all PPC Apple is done, maybe there is a need that MorphOS Team is ought to control the sales of some mid-ranged PPC board?

They won't just disappear from vendors' stocks, right? I personally think it is pretty much safe, alas requires investment (but this one might come from MorphOS licenses I guess).

Quote:

Sure they do, with multi license discounts and realistic prices. I paid $20 for snow leopard which is about the same jump from MorphOS 1.4 to 2.0 in terms of features. Before that I paid $48 with my government employee discount.

I find it laughable that with the exception of a few users the only people in favor of the price and draconian hardware locks are those developers not having to deal with them.

[ Edited by Acill on 2009/12/26 11:07 ]

Acill,

So you exclude the initial public price of OSX, nice.

It's also funny that some people have absolutely no problems paying several hundreds euros for additional machines they would hypothetically install MorphOS on, but can't accept paying for the software.

[ Edited by Fab on 2009/12/26 19:25 ]

Hi All,
Registered today ;)
How do I Know my regestration number/
Wish to play the lottery with it.

Found it #728

[ Edited by osco on 2009/12/26 14:36 ]

I have to disagree on the user base dying out. My advice to the devs who are involved with distribution of MOS is to get some sort of solid ppc platform (easy said, not easily one i know) and then encourage us to spread the word. I currently am part of several altrenative OS sites and I have "advertised" MOS to them. They ask for a platform readily available, but not x86.

@Dreamcast270mhz

Well, I guess that is the reason why we saw a port to the ac mini and will see support for the G4 Powermac and probably some laptop. It may well be debatable if those G4 Apple maschines are a solid ppc platform, but IMHO they are the best too get right now. The G5 and consoles are too difficult for MorphOS at its current state.
I am not too concerned about the future of MorphOS bt surely would welcome if new users came in more frequently.

Yeah, I wasn't talking about consoles or G5. I'm hoping that open source bounty gets to a level where I can help, I just don't have the money to donate to it. I've done everything I can short of shelling out money to buy my mac mini friends MOS licenses. The G4 series is a... stop gap solution that will suffice for now. I have an ibook and a powerbook waiting hungrily for MOS. The users here talking about Amiga class operating systems on x86 is pure suicide. If we do that, we suffer the fate of BeOS because:

Piracy = rampant
Windows marketing would kill us
Nobody would really care
X86 is an inferior architecture, it may have brute force, but it handles the small stuff like the Thing with a shot glass

Quote:

I am not living in any dreamland, but I do have hopes that MorphOS will continue to improve and expand, I won't deny that. If it is a dream, only time will tell. I have no doubt that there are many former users like yourself that are angry or disappointed with the decisions the MorphOS team has made regarding security and pricing, but I don't know if those emotions from some users is going to equal the downfall and failure of MorphOS to survive. MorphOS has a small chance to survive with or without those emotions from former users and some remaining users that are no happy about those decisions.

As far as survivability, MorphOS is in the same boat as AmigaOS3.x, AmigaOS4.x and several dozen other alternative OSes around the planet. It bothers me that the team does not do more to appease the disenchanted former and current MorphOS users that are so displeased about the licensing scheme tied to the hardware the way it is and pricing of a MorphOS key, but I don't have any answers about what they could do to make everyone happy and still feel secure that their work is protected from piracy, so until someone advances some ideas that work for both sides of these disagreements, I can't blame the MorphOS team for what they have done (other than my wish that they would lower the price of MorphOS license key to a more publicly acceptable amount, like 99 euros, just to shut up those that are complaining about the price and to hopefully spur a bunch of potential AmigaOS3.x and AmigaOS4.x users to switch to using MorphOS2.4 and create more activity and hopefully more development on and for MorphOS. But that is only a marketing decision and no one can be 100% certain of any results for such a change in pricing).

As for your argument that the user base has probably gotten smaller since the introduction of 2.0, I won't dispute that assertion as it is very likely that many 1.4 users would not have continued to use MorphOS after there was any charge for it introduced. Amiga users are notorious for being a bunch of cheap-skates that don't want to pay for anything, but continue to spend small fortunes on systems that have been outdated for over 10 to 15 years. We are a weird group and many are addicted to the name Amiga and anything that has anything to do with it.

Can you really blame the MorphOS team for finally deciding to start getting back at least some beer and pizza money for all their hours of work on this MorphOS project? None of them are getting rich from ~730 license fees when you have so many members on the development team and we are talking about years of work. I multiplied it out once and it came out to some crazy low hourly wage comparable to something a McDonald's employee might make.

[ Edited by amigadave on 2009/12/28 13:24 ]