Quote:
Originally Posted by hth313
You could be right on your 2 order of magnitude.
I was "nice" enough to count on developers alone, not really having much overhead and got 1 order of magnitude being on the optimistic (but hopefully realistic) side of revenue.
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Developers aren’t the major overhead. Testers are. And with Amiga there are so many permutations of hardware and configuration that testing is v expensive. Add on the fact that good chunks of the OS are in assembler (making unit testing a nightmare) and the bits that are in C have no unit tests adds up to the fact that testing a change would cost a fortune.
Further add on that nobody makes money from operating systems these days.. they are a loss leader to sell other software and services.
It’s not just Amiga. It doesn’t make sense to develop operating systems anymore. Even Sun/Oracle stopped doing it because it didn’t make sense and they have a much bigger user base with customers that are prepared to pay.
EDIT: of course you can take a risk and ship without comprehensive testing but if something goes wrong it could cost you more to put right than you made. You would be better investing your money in the stock market. And this whole venture would need startup capital... that has to come from somewhere