Originally Posted by TiredOfLife:
@Harrison
It is not mad to release 4.1, it's essential.
There are legal issues involving trademark ownership which are often awarded to the side that haven proven usage as apposed to just registered.
There is also the financial element.
If Hyperion are fighting the court case, we can assume they want to do something with the OS.
To sell copies of it for other machines if/when they win the court case, they need to keep developing it to keep it modern.
In which case, it makes sense to make some money along the way where possible.
Nothing is lost selling copies of something they already have.
Whilst that is all true, the number of working Amiga One's that are still actively being used by owners can't be that high. How many Amiga One's were actually made to date? I've no idea, but it wasn't that many. Therefore the potential number of sales for an updated release of the OS is going to be minimal at best. A couple of hundred copies maybe?
And no support for classic PPC systems means even less systems able to run it.
Such numbers seems a bit futile in my view.
Yes, continued development of the OS is essential, however it is already many years behind the current OS marketplace and is continuing to fall further backwards all of the time.
The release can only be for the one reason to try and prove it is a viable OS with sales potential in todays market. Somehow to try and prove an argument for the agreement to develop it further.
However the only real market (as I keep saying) is with the Intel compatible PC hardware market. To sell an OS these days you have to be able to get hold of the hardware to run it. PPC processors are getting rarer by the day, whereas Intel processors and all related hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper. For example I could build a complete working PC for much less than the cheapest PPC accelerator card I've seen sell recently(£160).
If we view the Amiga PPC market as remaining just an extension of the existing Amiga range, and therefore remaining as an enthusiasts OS, then sticking with PPC is going to happen as it is staying with the old technology of the Amiga. However if we want the AmigaOS to develop. To support newer technology (USB2, Firewire, SATA, PCI-E, current GPUs, current Soundcards etc) at affordable prices and have an new version of the AmigaOS that delivers the features of a modern OS, then we need to see an Intel version developed.