Moving Right Along...
by Ron Schwartz, the AmiTech-Dayton Gazette, November 2003
Things just keep moving along in the Amiga Community. Over the last year we had more than our share of false starts, as the new systems have appeared in bits and pieces. As the Amiga Community moves toward the complete release of the new generation systems, the first problem is, there are two basic systems competing for the allegiance of the Community. On the surface that might appear to be a good thing, since it provides some choices for its members. On the other hand, the Community is not nearly as large as it once was. Unless both of these systems can significantly expand their market by luring former Amigans back and/or having very aggressive and efficient marketing that brings in a significant number of customers from the general computer community, it is highly unlikely that both, or possibly either, will survive. On the surface, it appears that Genesi, the Pegasos/MorphOS company, is in a much stronger position financially. Genesi was formed by the merger of, I believe, four companies involved in the development and marketing of the Pegasos and Morph OS. One of them was Thendic-France, which was primarily involved in marketing. Among other things, they have done an excellent job of publicizing the Pegasos/MorphOS system, at least within the Amiga Community. No sooner is an agreement made to port a program to Morph, or adapt hardware to the Pegasos, or that another OS has been made compatible with the Pegasos, it appears on most of the Amiga web sites. (There are those that refuse to include information about Pegasos/Morph because they are not "Amiga"). This does not appear to be true of Amiga, Inc. In fact, currently, there seems to be very little information coming from Amiga, Inc. What releases there are about Amiga seem to be coming from Hyperion and Eyetech. In fact, since the lawsuit between Genesi and Amiga, Inc. Bill McEwen seems to have disappeared completely, after avoiding testifying, by claiming ill health. The information coming from that trial, however, indicated that Amiga, Inc. was two million in debt and at that time had assets of less than $100.00. Of course, most of the debt was salaries owed to the Amiga executives, which says something about their management. That information is also nearly two months old and little else has been reported. With regard to releases about applications being developed or ported to the two systems, there are a significant number of reports regarding things being applied to Amiga One/OS4. For the Pegasos/Morph, however, almost every time you go to some of the web sites there is a new release about something being applied to it.
The other side of the story seems to be a difference in priorities between the two companies. Amiga, Inc.'s first priority appears to be the operating system, whether it be Amiga DE/Anywhere, or Amiga OS4. The decision to develop the Amiga One appears to be primarily to support OS4. Genesi, on the other hand appears to have placed its first priority on the Pegasos. While Pegasos was designed to utilize the MorphOS, it has been developed to accommodate several other operating systems and they are adding more all the time. Some of the most recent news in this respect has been compatibility with AROS and Genesi has been in negotiations with the REBOL people. They are investigating the possibility of either incorporating features of REBOL into Morph or making REBOL fully compatible with Pegasos. They are also looking at adopting Open BSD for Pegasos. In addition, Genesi has been in negotiations with R. J. Mical, former Amigan, co-designer of the Atari Lynx, hand held game and 3DO, to be a consultant. He is currently working for Fathammer Mobile Games.
In related news, demand for the PowerPC chips has grown to such an extent that IBM's production capacity is no longer adequate. They have brought Samsung into the picture to increase capacity. News of a more general nature has the SCO Group, who apparently are the current owners of the UNIX OS patents, suing IBM regarding infringement of their patents. The patent infringement has to do with the development of LINUX. IBM maintains that LINUX is covered by something called the General Public License(GPL). They are backed by the Free Software Foundation. Considering how many people and companies are involved in the development and marketing of all the various versions of LINUX available, it is not at all clear to me why they have singled out IBM for the lawsuit. Over and above the basic positions of the opponents in this lawsuit, there are a number of interesting complications. At one point SCO were producing and selling a version of LINUX, but they decided to quit before they initiated the lawsuit. Next, SCO have marketed a number of software items that they could only do because they had access through the GPL. In addition, Redhat, one of the major LINUX developers and sellers, has instituted a counter suit against SCO. I have not seen enough detail on that to understand what it is all about. IBM appears to be unconcerned about the whole thing, feeling that SCO basically doesn't have a leg to stand on. SCO, on the other hand seems confident they will win and have indicated that when they win they will collect direct payments from all LINUX users. Good luck on that one.