Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2720 from 2003/2/24
Quote:Andreas_Wolf wrote:
> back when that port was initiated, the Efika was mostly seen as a platform "to get
> things going" by Genesi, while waiting for the 5121e based "LimePC" devices.
Just to put this into chronologic perspective: Genesi's payment to the MorphOS Team for porting MorphOS to the Efika 5200B took place no later than January 2007. The letter of intent between THTF/MTC and Genesi was signed in
October 2007. Freescale announced the MPC5121e in May 2007 to start sampling one month later. So I think it's clear that in January 2007 there were no "LimePC" devices nor any other MPC5121e based device in any kind of development.
The Efika was the means to an end, not the end by itself. It was an evaluation/development platform while waiting for "the real thing", which was a highly moving target at that point. Genesi had ideas for consumer devices. Early on they thought of a potential two-chip solution (or even three-chip) based on the 5200B. But those ideas were quickly abandoned. BBRV had good relations with Freescale, and learned early on what was in the pipeline (the 5121e, etc). They searched for a bigger partner in order to realize their ideas, they found THTF, and the result became known as "LimePC", a cooperation which crashed and burned later on. When PPC was out of the question for these kind of devices, they took the same ideas and moved on to ARM and a new cooperation with Pegatron instead (Asus development company). The result is the Efika MX products. It has been the same quest all along, the goal has been the same, only different means to that end.
Quote:
At this point in time Genesi had mere intentions to develop devices based on a future and not even announced yet MPC5200B successor SoC that's to include a 3D capable graphics core:
http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2006/10/wanting-what-you-have.html
Which is the 5121e, and the products that became the "LimePC".
Quote:
> MorphOS could have played a key part there
While BBRV indeed said so many times, Neko contradicted these statements:
"Except for overexcitement on the part of one executive, MorphOS was not in their interests at all"
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6196&forum=11&post_id=63156#63156
I never claimed that MorphOS was realized for LimePC, only that this was *one* of the reasons to why Genesi would want to bring it to the Efika (there were others as well), and possibly also a reason (aside from a porting fee) to why RS agreed; a shot towards a potential big future.
The reasons to why it wasn't are probably several; like THTF executives simply not wanting to buy into it, like the MorphOS team releasing it for the *efika* two years after the agreement was done, etc. Another big downer in the context, and this is generally speaking and not particular to MorphOS, was of course that the 5121e surprised the interested parties by not having memory coherency, which effectively ruined the purpose of having done prior OS/SW development on the Efika 5200B platform; the chain was broken, the chips turned out to be fundamentally too different.
Quote:
> I doubt that anyone gets enough money from the license fees to say
> that *revenue* is their biggest motivation for MorphOS development.
I fail to see anyone said that in this thread.
Indeed it seems you do. Go back in the thread and read the posts talking about business, volume, revenue, payment from Genesi, etc. They suggest that business sense and revenue is what decides what platforms should be supported. And while I to some extent agrees that money plays a part, I don't think it's the driving force. MorphOS licenses are short of 1000 units (and it has probably peaked now, as in amount of users, additional sales are probably to the same users buying new licenses for "new" HW), which means some 100.000+ EUR in total revenues. This might look like a lot of money to a common working man, but deduct various taxes, spread it out over the all the months of which MorphOS 2 has been on "the market", as well as the people involved (I guess most devs would get at least *something* from the license fees) which probably also includes some social welfare tax, and you will see that there isn't really a business going here, at least not something you can live on. Had *business* been the biggest motivator for MorphOS development, then the OS would have been ported to a different architecture a long time ago, and/or niched differently than a general desktop OS. But since most devs mainly seems to be here for hobby reasons, second hand Mac's are perfectly adequate. So the way I see it, money/"business" isn't the biggest motivator for development and primary reason to decide upon which one of the more and more obscure PPC based computers to support...
MorphOS is Amiga
done right! 
MorphOS NG will be AROS
done right!
