Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2720 from 2003/2/24
Quote:
DrZarkov wrote:
With the experiance of the last 10 years Amiga it looks for me like the MorphOS-Team and Genesi are "divorced" now.
Looking back on the posts from "the Official MorphOS Team", I believe that there are indeed some quarrel between the MorphOS developers (or at least the head honcho) and Genesi. And looking back on the latest year, it's not difficult to see why. Things were going fine in the beginning, Genesi had a lot of resources and made a lot of promises based on the assumption that they would still have a lot of resources for some time to come. However, unexpected things of major magnitude happened (I am talking about the Pretory thing here), and the situation changed radically. We have seen "Pissed Webmasters" ranting about this in public, as well as a few developers. And some time ago there was these sudden announcements signed by "the Official MorphOS Team" (and not Genesi).
But I would not go as far as call it "divorce", not yet at least. Instead, I see these happenings as ways of putting some preassure onto Genesi from the head MorphOS developers, to force some kind of change. These people has been silent very long, and they still are (kind of), not complaining in public or anything like that. Perhaps they have been waiting for a while to see if better times will come? And perhaps now, when things are actually beginning to happen with the Pegasos sales, they don't agree to BBRV's priorities of how to spend the money? Perhaps they want some piece of that cace now?
As I said, I don't think they are divorced just quite yet. I see this change of website thing as another way of increasing some preasure on Genesi, to bring them to the negotiation table for a serious discussion about the future. The silence from all parties are IMHO a sign of discussions going on. So I think the silence is a good sign. No new world order has been announced, nothing fundamental has really changed yet (the DNS could easily be pointed back to
http://64.246.36.198 in a minute or so). No one has burnt any bridges in public yet, the things that has been made available is only some "Update: 'new' website online. More to come" message, and *not* some "From now on MorphOS will be developed completely separate from Genesi and the Pegasos" message, so there should still be ways back. But *when* the silence brakes, I think that there will be by a significant announcement - either a divorce or a formal wedding.
I don't know how the ownership and financing of Genesi is set up. I believe that there are no venture capitalists involved, and while this might be a relief for the people involved (I have seen how those VC's can be a pain in the butt and how they may screw things up sometimes with their clueless ideas), perhaps this would be a solution? Perhaps BBRV is setting their hopes to Pegasos sales (organic growth is often the best too), but perhaps money from those won't pour in fast enough?
Quote:
As long as they continue developement, it does not matter to me. But it does not look good to me for the future of this hardware platform...
Oh, the hardware will not be too difficult to sell, especially when they manage to bring the costs/prices down. The Pegasos hardware now stands at the launch pod, it's fuel tanks are filling up and the engines are starting, and soon it might very well take off. The support from Freescale (and now also IBM?) is a good thing, and the SNDF Europe event is around the corner, which is a big thing in all aspects. The Pegasos could do just fine with Linux alone; almost all nische/industrial hardware are sold with Linux today.
But I think you are very naive if you believe that MorphOS will have much of a chance of a bright future alone (or a future *at all*). You know, it's not just about the *development* of the OS, in fact, that will be the *easy* part. It's about making it a commercial success. If you look back through recent years you will see that many (most!) interesting OS projects simply died, not because they were technically bad in any way, but because they failed to establish themselves on a market. Without a solid underlying business, nothing can sustain. Maybe Genesi hasn't been able to provide that this far, but maybe they are going there now?
On the desktop market, MS Windows is the dominator. Nothing will threat Windows position here, and it's only through Microsofts dominating position that it's posible for them to actually charge money for their OS. The other destkop OS that exists in real life is Mac OS, and the reason to why Apple still is here is because the symbiosis between the hardware and the software. It is *one* product, it's a Mac, not separate hardware and OS. For *all other purposes*, there is Linux, this open and free OS that is constantly under development (oh, and QNX of course, a commercial OS for purposes where Linux might not be enough).
The way I see it, MorphOS only chance of survival is by going the Mac route, to team up with hardware under *one flag*, to deliver *one product*. If they go down the route of trying to sell copies of their OS on their own (or even by trying to license it to some (who?) hardware manufacturer), I believe that the OS will be doomed, because a new, unproved, OS brings a dimension of insecurity and uncertainty, it has very little to offer that other (proved!) solutions can't match, and they will not have the financial resources to challange the leaders on the commercial "solo-OS" markets.
MorphOS is Amiga
done right! 
MorphOS NG will be AROS
done right!
Targhan