| [Rant] Open letter to Fleecy Moss and Amiga, Inc. | ANN.lu |
| Posted on 18-Mar-2003 15:16 GMT by Seehund | 83 comments
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I sent Amiga, Inc. and Fleecy Moss an open letter in response to his statements on AmigaWorld.net and in Total Amiga Magazine about the hardware market restrictions imposed on AmigaOS. You can read it here.
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| Open letter to Fleecy Moss and Amiga, Inc. : Comment 64 of 83 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Seehund on 19-Mar-2003 12:50 GMT | In reply to Comment 21 (anonymous):
> Those that object to this measure have their own ulterior motives
Yes, and Elvis is alive, playing every Friday night at Adolf Hitler's Argentinian hacienda. Jimmy Hoffa plays the bass. And they're all part of the vast MorphOS conspiracy that doesn't give a sh|t about whether their Teron is sold by X or Y as long as it's cheap and works as it should. And Seehund has gathered a thousand stormtroopers to their disposal, and their first course of action was to hire Al-Quaida to create the 11/9 diversion to stop AInc from ordering T-shirts. Am I with you so far? :P
Sheesh.
> and none of them provide a convincing argument why anti-piracy provisions
> should be eliminated:
Dunno about others, but why would I provide such arguments, when I'm NOT arguing for the elimination of anti-piracy provisions? Did you click on the link up there in the submitted "Rant"? Have you ever had a look at the rest of that site? Have you even read the petition?
> 1. A desire to run OS4 on another platform: anti-piracy measures are
> irrelevant -- if the code does not support other architectures it simply will
> not work.
Correct. And obvious.
http://amigapop.8bit.co.uk/faq.html#3
http://amigapop.8bit.co.uk/faq.html#4
Note that a Teron board distributed by one company is not a different architecture compared to a Teron board distributed by any other company.
If a port is made to another architecture (which currently would require licensing by a hardware vendor), then that hardware sold under the "AmigaOne" license would not suddenly become a different architecture compared to the same hardware sold normally.
> Consumer demand will determine if and when additional systems are supported.
If it only were so well. Consumer demand (i.e. consumers other than a subset of the ridiculously few current Amiga/AmigaOS users, i.e. a real market) is put out of play, THERE IS A HARDWARE VENDOR LICENSING REQUIREMENT in addition. No licensee - no port, no matter what the demand. No port to popular/common hardware, plus no option to buy the OS for already supported hardware sold by others than the licensee - less consumer demand. It's a vicious cycle.
As it is now, Hyperion (or a third party) can't simply ask themselves "Is this or that piece of hardware commercially interesting for a port?". Not without adding "...and is there a hardware vendor interested in getting licensed to sell AmigaOS for us bundled with their hardware, provide some form of license verification mechanism and provide software support, and sell it to a so far commercially unattractive market of AmigaOS users, that already is saturated by Eyetech, while trying to stay somewhat competitive to everyone who sells the same hardware normally?"
> 2. The requirement dissuades companies from developing additional Amiga
> solutions:
Huh? Nobody develops hardware for AmigaOS.
> there are no vendors lining up and showing interest in producing additional
> hardware.
BLING BLING! We have a winner! There is no "Amiga hardware". There is no commercial interest from third parties in getting a license to be allowed to sell their hardware bundled with AmigaOS, other than *perhaps* some entity already on the current Amiga "market" who could perhaps flog a couple of dozen of somebody's boards to the already converted. If the current remnants of the Amiga market is all that AInc is aiming for (and I see that MarkTime has already pointed out the ambiguities regarding that), then what's the point of it all?
Judging from the introduction of your post I first thought you were disagreeing with me, but now I'm beginning to wonder... :)
> No one has abandoned the market as a result of this requirement.
No one has entered the "market". The "market" is currently owned by Eyetech.
> 3. Anti-piracy measures are futile: there are certainly no guarantees that any
> anti-piracy solution will be effective in the long run but it does allow the
> existing vendors to transparently protect their investment.
http://amigapop.8bit.co.uk/faq.html#8
I'm saying that THIS implementation of alleged anti-piracy measures is just as futile as any other implementation. It's just that other implementations don't prevent any sales of the product it's allegedly intended to protect - AmigaOS.
http://amigapop.8bit.co.uk/faq.html#12
Whatever investments some hardware vendor might have done in the past is simply not interesting here. That has nothing to do with Amiga, Inc. and "their" product AmigaOS. I believe that AmigaOS is not to be considered as simply a means to skin AmigaOS users to subsidise and give artificial respiration to any particular hardware shop.
All this smells of "Thanks for failing to make a new Amiga, but now we're gonna run on off the shelf hardware. Would you like a monopoly on that, for old times' sake?" or "AmigaOS? Someone was doing that for us, right? I think there was someone messing with hardware too. Let them handle all that. Ooooh - someone's submitted a new mobile phone crossword game!" I don't quite know which scenario is worse.
> 4. Moral outrage: OS4 is a commercial product, not freeware or open source. If
> you have a fundamental issue with anti-piracy measures then this solution is
> not for you -- there are ample alternatives.
Could you all please stop it with the "issue with anti-piracy measures" nonsense already? I just wrote a reply to someone who implied that this is about objections against anti-piracy measures, once again refuting that implication for heaven's sake! Look! Up there! Click the damn link! Then those infamous "ANN orcs" still insist on yapping about piracy...
> 5. You're a MOS troll:
Sweet Jebus, spare us! I who was just beginning to believe that this particular kind of moron was as good as extinct today, with a few hardened pockets of lissencephalic resistance remaining over at the Yahoo "AmigaOne" group and amigaworld.net, collectively masturbating over "new Amigas" and organising Group Hate sessions against "peecees" and "MOS trolls"...
> anti-piracy measures don't prevent you from running OS4 on your Pegasos,
> Genesi does
*sigh*
Ah, yes, evil Genesi for not getting a license to sell somebody else's OS bundled with *their own hardware* and call it "AmigaOne" when they already have an OS of *their own*. :P Same thing with Apple.
Neither Pegasoses nor Macs are "secrets". If something runs Linux perfectly fine (and *BSD, and OpenDarwin, and...), then it just can not be secret.
Even *IF* this hardware were secret, then what kind of logic are you applying when you deduce that the hardware vendor licensing requirement (a.k.a. "anti-piracy measures") is NOT what's stopping a port? The requirement would still be there, and it would most certainly NOT work as an incentive to convince this fictional secret-hardware-maker to share documentation! What you insist on mistakenly referring to as "anti-piracy measures" is an artificial construction that applies to ALL hardware, no matter if it's "open" or "secret". It must be removed.
http://amigapop.8bit.co.uk/faq.html#14 |
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