| [Forum] We should all stand tougether! | ANN.lu |
| Posted on 16-Jul-2004 11:56 GMT by Michal (Edited on 2004-07-17 14:23:44 GMT by Teemu I. Yliselä) | 76 comments
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Amiga is now so divided that groups is threaten its reputation. More and more people which I try to sell MorphOS or AmigaOS4 to, says that the war/etc discussions between this groups kills the platform. Amiga needs a good reputation and it wont have that before we all agree on that going on with both under one name. Which is AMIGA as PC is in the other side of computing. Amiga is a strong word. People remember it,.. but with Amiga showing off that we have AmigaOne, Pegasos etc++ That the community is running PPC motherboard components. That this community is about beein our self. To show that we are different.
This is good! And we need to turn the negative words against each other over to positive words. We as the Amiga community controlled lots of it, when everything seemed lost. And now were splitted for nothing? Who's to blame? No one! Its about time, its about the time we all have waited. That users, etc companies have found out how good AmigaOS code is. That it is revolutionary in many ways, but it dosen't help when this community trhows snowballs on each sides when actually both sides is fighting for the same thing. To be the next generation Amiga.
But as Classic Amiga was and is the real Amiga. This new PPC motherboards is not Amiga at all. But they are choices. They have become new choices for everyone. And now we need to rebuild it all. We need to focus on getting Amiga reputation back. And that Amiga as from now on stands for what we all was and are. A userbase that is different and that we really care about each others.
Let us be the Spirit Of Amiga. Let us give Amiga a new life, a community that cares and that wants support from other big companies etc. Medias have allways been overwhelming positive over us. We cannot destroy it now. We need to focus on beeing an alternative platform to Linux, BeOS, Windows, MacOS etc.
Spirit Of Amiga logo
Now lets start to be what Amiga is allways been. The personal computer for home and entertainment areas!
Regards,
Michal, www.amigaworld.org
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| We should all stand tougether! : Comment 66 of 76 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Sammy Nordström on 19-Jul-2004 03:41 GMT | In reply to Comment 64 (Janne):
My support for the companies with rights or a license to the brand has nothing to do with zealotry nor fanaticism. For me, it's all about trying to rebuild the Amiga market again.
A few thousand enthusiasts scattered all over the world, mostly bedroom coders or just exotic computer geeks, divided even further by different hardware and operating systems that is offering different and overly optimistic paths for the future that is replaced every third or fourth year, mostly before it has even materialized, by bancrupcies, buyouts and startups, etc. These are all things that are making it extremely difficult to build up a market value.
What we need is one unified Amiga standard (hardware as well as operating system), a loyal userbase that is willing to make that little extra effort and a realistic objective for the future with a good balance between risk and progress so that the hardware and software might actually be able to mature into viable products. What we don't need is a multitude of companies pulling us in different directions (using every means possible, even mudslinging and legal action), much less an open source movement.
I mean, with just a few thousands of enthusiast scattered all over the world, there simply is not enough purchasing power in this market to provide for a multitude of product alternatives nor enough developers that knows OS programming in order to provide for an open source alternative. We're having problems with providing for a single alternative as it is.
Furthermore, having a multitude of Amiga alternatives that all are competing for a total control of their market segment prevents us from sustaining a unified Amiga standard. Nowadays, we don't just have different hardware, we have different operating systems as well. The only thing our alternatives has in common is basicly just those old AmigaOS3.1 APIs and 68k emulation for backwards-compatibility. Who cares about any of that? We've had UAE for years alread which runs those old games and applications with much better compatibility. What we really need is to catch up with the rest of the desktop computer industry, new modern OS features such as virtual memory, memory protection, drivers for new modern devices, etc. However, as soon as the programmer of an application makes use of such features, the application has no longer the ability to be cross-compiled for another Amiga alternative. This is the reality of the Amiga software market today.
And for those of you that are not worried about such incompatibility issues, is it really that easy to forget the days of the Phase5 vs Haage&Partner war? This split in the PPC Amiga software market turned my BlizzardPPC expansion board into my biggest waste of money ever. I regret buying it because I had to dual boot between AmigaOS with WarpUP and AmigaOS with PowerUP in order to run all of my PPC software. It was insane and it is in my belief that the Amiga market would have probably been better without those PPC expansion boards.
I think that it is absolutely absurd now that we are basicly repeating this insanity, even ten times worse since we have gone from having different PPC libraries to entire operating systems. My guestimate would be that there are more people among the Amiga enthusiasts that are still using their classic Amiga computers than there are people who has "upgraded" to any of these new alternatives simply because so many have been discouraged by the lack of unity and direction for the future. This is one group in the Amiga community that those of us who has already decided on which alternative we prefer often seem to forget while fighting with each other.
This is why the community, users as well as companies, so desperately need to either start cooperating or go seperate ways. Everything in between is nothing but destructive for all parties involved. For example, Amiga Inc. already spent their first two years in office on negotiating for the sake of unity and came out empty handed. That was two valuble years of development on AmigaOS4 that went down the drain. Also, for the last few years, Genesi and Amiga Inc. has spent quite alot of their time and resources on legal action against each other, time and money that would have been better spent on development, IMO.
All of these years with constant bickering and destructive behaviour from all sides tells me that we do NOT have the ability to become one unified community again. Everytime someone tries, it's like someone banging his head in to a brick wall to see wether it will hurt as much as it did the last time. Why is it so hard to simply let everyone do their own thing instead of criticising everyone that hasn't made the same choices as we have? Why do we always have to look for each other's flaws? Why do we always have to take every opportunity to provoce?
Forgive me for beeing such a pessimist, but there is simply too much emotions involved in this community, not just among us users. No logo nor forum post will ever be able to change that.
"The name" issue is a good example of the fanaticism in this community. Almost everybody, including myself, say that they are not followers of "the name" and don't have some form of emotional attachment to it. However, I once suggested that only users of "the name" computers would be members of the Amiga community, while everyone else would be members of the community for the same computer as they use rather than the Amiga community. The result was hundreds of very upset posts were people tried to explain to me about the "Amiga spirit" and some posts even had to be deleted because they were violating the ANN.lu posting guidelines.
It's funny how those of us who see the name for what it really is, a trademark for a certain computer product line, are called "blind followers", while those who has invented some kind of religion that they call the "Amiga spirit" are the ones that "don't care" about the name...
Anyway, sorry about the lengthy post (is it some kind of record?). I hope you were patient enough to read it in full and perhaps even got to see a few things out of my point of view, in which case I would be very grateful.
G'night, folks! |
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