| From: | James Russell |
| Date: | 15 Sep 2000 at 05:22:24 |
| Subject: | Re: [Re: AMIOPEN: Free SDK? (was: Absence of VP in distros, and strategy)] |
"Victor I. Haaz" <victor@pannonline.hu> wrote:
> It was talks about free downloadable UPDATES to the SDK, for a given perion
of time!
>
> Victor
>
By updates, I think they mean updates to the version SDK you bought, not an
"update," say, to the Windows version, which would be a separate purchase.
As to what I remember of the SDK, it was never going to be free. In St. Louis
last April, Amiga initially planned only to release developer machines
including the SDK, not a standalone SDK -- at least so I and others with me at
the show remember -- but one way or another realized that a CD-only option was
a must, because not everyone wants to buy another PC when they could just
upgrade a card or two to their existing (in many cases better) PC.
The fact is, with Amiga promising never to compete in the application market
and releasing open-standards architecture specifications, the only thing Amiga
has to sell is the Amiga DE, and that is what you are now purchasing, in
bare-bones form, but you are still getting the operating system, and unlike
with other modern popular operating systems, it is a system WELL worth paying
for, at least that's how I see it.
Especially, and consider this, how drastically Amiga is dropping the price of
Amiga hardware by going with open, quality standards. A high-level BoXeR
system, if I remember (the closest thing to current Classic Amiga hardware)
costs $5000 (the computer I priced did, at least)! A high-end Alpha system
would probably cost half that, with similar processing power.
Anyway, I think the SDK is definitely worth paying for.
James
James Russell
Editor-in-chief Amiga.org
Developer forums at Amiga.org:
http://forums.amiga.org/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi
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