Okay, I'm sick and tired of fighting on mailing lists over every tiny nit-picking detail people can find in my arguments. Let's explain my views, tell a little story, then you can all decide whether I'm "whinging for no reason" like someone thinks I probably shouldn't.
A little over a year and a half ago, Gateway decided that we'd all like a Linux-based settop box to toy with, something which would eventually turn into something rather nifty for AOL to ship around the USA. We didn't like it. We'd rather they'd have stayed with what they planned in the previous two product incarnations: a QNX-based (previously BeOS-based) microkernel OS with Amiga- like solutions on top, or in fact a reworking of the original AmigaOS for modern CPUs.
Given that we'd all gotten used to, and quite fond of, QNX (and the idea of using it on our existing PPC Amigas), that was a route we'd decided to accept as the route we'd like Amiga to have taken. Stuff like Phoenix was born (although you'll never find out the true reason why, but it was meant to be something substantially more than using QNX to spite Amiga's new plans) - and products such as the RealityStation have popped up out of it.
Late December: two ex-employees turn up and "buy" Amiga from Gateway with the intention of using an as-yet-unheard-of and also as-yet-unproven microkernel operating system as the basis of their new product.
Fine, I guess, but it would entail another 18 month development cycle, an 18 month development cycle we'd had enough of twice already waiting for the LAST plans an Amiga came up with.
I for one was ready to accept Tao as being an okay little system, although I still cannot see the point of any of it's so called revolutionary features: why I should learn to code in VP when I could just recompile some C code (which is perfectly possible on QNX) and why I should be excited by this wonderful graphics system that let me tint my terminal windows in sepia and bounce a boingball around, double-buffered and vertical-synced, on my display.
Then, in something which could only be described as predictable, Fleecy decided to mouth off at Dan Dodge (head guy, QNX) on the Team Amiga mailing list. If anyone could discount the audacity it was Team Amiga, the bunch of brown-nosing twits that I now consider most of them to be. So-called "working together" between Amiga and Phoenix was decided on although this was to be as much of a farce as Fleecy's attitude, which was to basically take ideas on the operation of a developer community, and instead of utilising infrastructure in place or helping to install such infrastructure, to go it alone on things like the AAC or www.amigadev.net - asking for specific NDAs on development for Amiga stuff (which meant that basically Amiga were listening in on everything that went on in Phoenix, when it wasn't squabbling over direction, but Phoenix never got to listen in on Amiga's plans in return).
Not acceptable. I didn't much like Fleecy, Bill or Gary anyway, but these "tactics" are plain underhanded. Suffice to say they were unceremoniously (as in, nobody noticed) kicked out. Not that they cared.
(it has since been explained to me that Bill McEwen apologised personally for the Team Amiga incident, although I kinda feel that Fleecy should have apologised - although I really do feel that he shouldn't have said anything in the first place - let alone his "unprofessional, immature, stupid rant" to paraphrase Bill McEwen)
AmigaDE 1.0 was released sometime nearer the middle of the year: we were told that this is what the "new Amiga" was to be based on. No mention at all of any "desktop Amiga" was mentioned, but the Community thought that it was a done deal, it didn't NEED to be mentioned. We all know that Amiga never had it planned: the world of PDAs, Tablets, Phones and Settops was their goal (a goal which was no different to the one Fleecy and Bill were working on at Gateway, just with a different OS)
We were told that we'd need a PC running Linux to run the kit, and a Windows version would be along later. Sure, we all have PCs anyway, and anyone "in the know" would realise that the PC route is there because there's no such thing as a self-hosted development environment for a PDA.
It lacked 3D graphics support, and audio support, and some other things we might well have liked (after all, without that all it's good for is a silent 240x360 version of Pacman, right? With the Gameboy Advance looming on the horizon, PDAs are certainly capable of something more advanced). KOAN and Mesa were announced to fill this gap, to be implemented for the next release...
It lacked (and still does lack) almost essential development features like memory protection and real resource tracking - and also virtual memory. But this is discountable because it's for a PDA or a Settop - systems which don't require these kinds of things.
I can accept that. I work on these things for a living NOW, I don't really mind that at all that the settop doesn't have an MMU or FPU - because I have a debugger on my PC to trap stuff that goes wrong, and I can trace stuff and catch exceptions with great ease (when it works :).
MorphOS is released to the public at around the same time (or maybe it was just before..). It's good: it's PPC, it runs your old Amiga apps, it's pretty damned fast, and has decent support from the start! Wow.. this is what Amiga would have been doing if they hadn't have gone through the QNX ->Linux->Tao route through all those changes and buyouts.
Some people (i.e. me) really are beginning to wonder whether this is the solution people really want for an Amiga - because certainly some people wanted a desktop environment, but we all knew deep down that we'd have a Handspring Visor or an Internet Fridge instead. This was not a bad thing to know: these kinds of things are cool.
An affiliation with http://www.devicetop.com pretty much confirmed this. This isn't a site for desktop computers.
But.. then almost precisely at the same time, Amiga decided that there WAS going to be some desktop environment - an entire computer designed to run this AmigaDE. I'm sorry, but you cannot have a modern multi-user desktop solution without those essential features that it lacked.
Amiga decided to deny that this was true. Tao decided to enforce the fact that Tao wasn't EVER going to get this kind of thing into their miniature-devices operating system. And then, out of the blue, they decided that they WERE going to have memory protection, virtual memory and all kinds of neat desktop-class (nearing server-class) features.
How do they manage to to do this? Well, apparently they've had a change of heart: the Tao-based solution just wouldn't cut it for their new desktop-nay-server class product line.
We get AmigaOS 3.9 - an OS which they say "if it gets 50,000 sales, we'll create an AmigaOS 4.x". Ha! This is merely a clever ploy to a) get sales and b) never have to make AmigaOS 4.x. I kinda commended them on that announcement ;)
The AmigaOne comes into play, as does the Pegasos PPC motherboard (which incidentally runs MorphOS as a sideline). These are the machines that will run the magical Amiga Digital Environment. hey - we get the best of both worlds: our old Amiga is still attached for the AmigaOne so we can run either OS. As for the Pegasos, it runs the AmigaDE or MorphOS - also the best of both worlds..
But here's the surprise:
They're going to resurrect the Classic AmigaOS! They're going to port to PPC, and then add memory protection, virtual memory, and all kinds of cool new features and then integrate the AmigaDE to create some kind of fantastic new thing. Now if this isn't a huge change in direction, then I don't know what is. But it's probably a welcome one: we all want a PPC Native AmigaOS 4.x.
.. but isn't this what MorphOS was anyway? Hell, it's already doing that, with most of the important parts of the OS running on PPC, a 68k emulator, support for decent graphics boards in the pipe, a PPC version of AHI to run on it.. surely this cannot be a coincidence that Amiga are producing the exact same thing.
But apparently it is: Fleecy has stated that the demands the MorphOS team have "made" are unacceptable to Amiga, and so instead of leveraging what they have already available, they must choose another solution that ultimately boils down to CONTROL - they would rather go it from scratch and have full say over the tiniest details, than use something which is (and Fleecy has said this) superior and has a shorter time-to-release than anything Amiga itself or any of it's contractors would produce.
(this doesn't mean that MorphOS and AmigaOS 4.x would be competitors in a market: if they weren't one and the same then they would at worst simply complement each other. At best, they would spur each other on and improve both systems out of something like one-up-manship. But I'd rather they were one and the same.)
I just don't see where they are trying to go: they've pretty much hidden their entire agenda from us from the word Go! And that they did tell us has all changed. We are now expected to purchase a large amount of specialised hardware to get anything developed for the desktop Amiga we always wanted - when some people were convinced that they would just need a standard PC. Processor independance is a moot point now that we're guaranteed to be running on a PowerPC, too.. so what's the point of VP code?
And this brings us back to the AmigaDE Party Pack. Ask yourself how long it's been since Amiga announced anything substantial that wasn't "Amiga pledges to work with xyz to do zyx". A *long* time.
So what happens? They decide that it would be a better idea to release a pre-release version of their development kit to generate a little interest again: I dare say they saw how bare Amiga.org and MooBunny were becoming of Amiga specific news items. Ask yourself this: what is *in* the AmigaDE 1.1 Party Pack? Oh, you get the newest version of the SDK. And some vouchers of purpose unclear (verily).
How many people here actually bought the AmigaDE 1.1? How many of you has the AmigaDE 1.0 (or 1.01) too? Did you not resent the fact that you didn't get an upgrade deal, because I certainly would have. I'm not sure I'd be too happy of paying $100 every 9 months just for the privilege of development.
How many of you actually knew what was DIFFERENT from the AmigaDE 1.0 in the new AmigaDE pre-release? It was news to me a few days ago that it actually had the KOAN audio system in.
How many of you bothered to find out before you bought it what the features in the kit were? I seriously doubt *any* developer who would buy his tools out of loyality rather than usefulness. Trying to repair your car? Why, when I was a kid I had a Fisher Price toolkit. I'm so loyal to them that my red plastic hammer and green foam chisel will fix the fact that my brake fluid is leaking!!
I just don't see that Amiga have anything to offer any serious developer (which is what I am) over other (more lucrative :) solutions. Be that WindowsCE, BeIA, PalmOS or QNX (which incidentally is now becoming quite an industry slut, appearing on many devices.. IBM seem to like it, and got Opera to port their browser to it. This is also a sly dig at Mozilla: the most unportable portable, unembeddable embedded browser available, so free that you have to pay a commercial company to write a better browser lest you spend any money on it :)
I don't see why the USERS are getting so excited either: what exactly are they offering you? A new computer? A new OS? Have you seen either? How can you get that excited about something SO new and SO unproven?
Tell me if I'm whinging - but to tell you the truth I couldn't give a flying shit if I was. I'm tired of the constant switching and changing, trying to keep up with what Amiga are doing, wondering whether I should or shouldn't follow them in whatever, wondering why they keep making (and then admitting that they are making) these bad decisions.