Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2720 from 2003/2/24
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tomjoad wrote:
Btw, this is a good example for why I always say never licence any stuff that is an essential part of your project. As you see, trying to save money in the wrong places just results in disaster sooner or later.
Very true!
As far as I remember, the original plan was to ship AmigaOS 3.5 along with MorphOS. The Amiga workbench, various tools and utilities etc, would then have been installed on top of the MorphOS core. I recall that bbrv even bought a stock of some 1000 copies or so of that OS for this purpose (probably from Petro T). They went the route of licensing Ambient and MUI instead. Now afterwards, I wonder if we wouldn't have been better off with the workbench, installer, arexx, etc from the amiga os, while their native and improved counterparts were being developed in-house? But what has passed, has passed ...
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I had never been that fond of Genesi's way of approaching things. Like, throwing out free dev boards to everyone who had a project or an idea for one. May be cheaper than paying them for developing stuff, but in the end if they get tired of it, you still haven't got software and one board less.
I actually always thought that giving free boards to potentially interesting projects/developers has been a great idea. Also remember that most of the "phreeboards" were Pegasos 1 motherboards, many were traded in second hand boards, and that this program started first when it became obvious that it would be difficult to sell these boards at full price anyway, due to this certain "overfeatured" central HW component that "powered" this generation of the Pegasos (or is my memory letting me down here?). I am not aware of any large scale "phreeboard" program for the Pegasos 2, except perhaps for a few individual cases.
However, in my opinion the backside of this "giving for free" thing has made some people taking lots of things for granted and behave like little spoiled children, sitting on their fat asses and just crying for more, more, more instead of contributing to the common good. Some people have also never hecitated a second to complain loud and violent over the entire Internet if they had to wait a few weeks longer than expected for their free gifts. I feel that the kindness and generousity of Genesi has been exploited by some.
"Don't ask what this country can do for you, but what you can ..."
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I think it would have been the best way to have in-house (at least, self-controlled) development of software targeted at some special markets to which you could sell the stuff as complete solutions (computer+monitor+preinstalled software), no matter whether Linux or MorphOS.
Don't you think that this is where we are heading now?
I don't think that MorphOS will die as an OS because of this, but its development will definitely be brought back in-house. This will probably mean a somewhat slower development pase for some time, at least until there is room for greater financial dissipation again. But on the other hand it might secure the future of the OS as a whole? It will probably mean that the OS will become "embedded", but perhaps an "embedded" MorphOS 1.5 could be installed on top of a "desktop" 1.4 installation, overvriting certain parts, adding other, but still keeping the desktop untouched? And then, in a future, there might be a new desktop developed in-house? Or perhaps open source? Wanderer and Zune from AROS, further developed by MorphOS developers and then released back to the community? Perhaps certain parts *should be* open source, while the key parts (the core componentes of the OS) could remain proprietary and be developed in-house?
[ Edited by takemehomegrandma on 2004/11/23 22:43 ]
MorphOS is Amiga
done right! 
MorphOS NG will be AROS
done right!
