[News] Petition: AmigaOS distribution policies and PPC hardware | ANN.lu |
Posted on 25-May-2002 20:50 GMT by Seehund | 187 comments View flat View list |
There's a petition aimed at Amiga Inc. set up at http://www.petitiononline.com/amigaos/ for all those who disagree with Amiga Inc's presented plans regarding compulsory OS/hardware bundling and licensing.
An excerpt from the petition:
On April 12th, 2002, you, Amiga Inc., published your plans regarding distribution policies for the forthcoming AmigaOS4 in an "Executive Update" on your web site.
In short, what you say and what we the undersigned object against is this:
* Any hardware capable of running AmigaOS must first be modified with "AmigaOS specific extensions" to its "boot ROM" in order to be allowed to run AmigaOS.
* Such hardware and its distributors must be approved and licensed by Amiga Inc. and the hardware distributors must also sell and support AmigaOS4.
* AmigaOS will only be available bundled with such hardware.
We think that the above will seriously hurt AmigaOS users, the POP/PPC hardware market and thus ultimately you, Amiga Inc., yourselves.
To read the entire petition and sign it, please click here.
Before those imagining sides, factions, camps and personal enemies everywhere start commenting, it must be emphasised that this poll is not intended to "promote" anything else than the success of AmigaOS, the POP/PPC hardware market, free choice and ethical business practices.
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Petition: AmigaOS distribution policies and PPC hardware : Comment 28 of 187 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Sam Dunham on 26-May-2002 05:42 GMT | In reply to Comment 12 (Seehund): The simple fact of the matter is that unless Amiga put some sort of copy protection in place, they (and the AmigaOS) will surely fail. By tieing the OS to authorized hardware (or a specific ROM), they can rest assured that 99.9% of the people running the OS have paid for it. The reasons I have no problems with this are twofold:
1. They are an extremely young company with not a lot of operating capitol. Piracy is rampant in the computer industry and hurts small fries like Amiga more harshly than the Microsofts of the world.
2. I personaly cannot think of a more solid copy protection scheme than dongling the OS with a ROM. It's easy to impliment and almost impossible to circumvent. Even if you could get around it by burning your own ROMs, it would probably not be cost effective.
Amigas have always been tied to hardware in one way or another, at least this way, the tieing is minimal and doesn't effect the operation of the machine past boot (ie. you can add any cards you want to your heart's content).
I say huzzah to Amiga for going this route. Heck, in the future, they may be able to release just the ROMs in a bundle with the OS (see, by still tieing the OS and ROMs together, copying the OS would be silly because you've already got it when you buy the ROM).
-Sam |
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