AmigaOS 3.1.4 withdrawn from market after Amiga

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I was talking about people, not platforms.

But what I said was true - the Amiga never had a chance of competing against PCs.

But this is not what you said in your other post.
You said "Amiga OS" was far behind - and since we we are talking about features (and bugs) of our OS here and not about marketshare, your statement was very misleading.

I am not against open source software (I expect to release some of my own in the next few days...). But I would rather not have my OS in the hands of a 'community' that keeps changing it to suit the whims of whoever can be bothered working on it.

well - but that is exactly what happened to our OS now numerous times (3.5, 3,9 MOS, OS4, pOS and now back to 3.1.4 ...), despite of being close source.

WarpOS, PowerUp, CyberVision, P96, ELF, MorphOS, OS4 were all developed to support other hardware. You think those hardware manufacturers should have made their all their products open source? I bet that idea would have gone down like a lead balloon.

Sure it makes sense to deliver open source drivers with your commercial hardware - even more so if you want others to accept your newly introduced API.
I really do not get your resentment here at all.

MUI vs. ReAction? It's unfortunate that either of them has effectively become a part of the OS, and open source wouldn't make it any better.

your point of view...

As part of my renewed interest in vintage computers I considered getting an ST or Archimedes, but couldn't get enthused.

Thanks to being Open Source now, a bounty project and many contributors, you can just get a RaspberryPi now and run RiscOS native on it.

Google "Atari-realm MinTOS" - 28,400 results. Hmm, not looking good.
Try "Atari MinTOS" - 32,400 results. Not much better, but at least there's a website:- MiNTOS Distribution. Is this what I am looking for?

No it's not.

https://freemint.github.io
http://emutos.sourceforge.net/en/

What could be worse? Every producer who tries to keep control of their IP is put down and leaves the Amiga market in disgust. OS development and 'distribution' is left up to a 'community' of individuals who all have their own ideas on what it should be. Anyone who refuses to go along with them is accused of being a Luddite.

That ist what already happened and continuous to happen!
So we should finally change things and go Open Source.

At one time I was a commercial Amiga software developer. In the end the company failed and I did not recover my investment, but I still feel it was worth doing. However, had someone told told me at the start that I would be put down for being 'selfish'...

Why would someone tell you that?
I do not get, what you are trying to say here.

[malko]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

They'll probably come up with another cludge agreement and carry on as before.

In an ideal world they'd form a new holding company together and jointly develop stuff but cooperation seems a long way off.

Hum... Maybe I'm forcing the line, but apart from trying to block emulation with DRM, it seems to me that the added value of Cloanto is very low in terms of Amiga OS for last decades.
Thus I am not sure (I only ask to be wrong) that such a company could bring anything new/positive even in a new holding.

Steril707 said it nicely. And this apply also to companies like Cloanto :

Originally Posted by Steril707

[...] It's the sum of someones behaviour that gives people an impression about that person. [...]

Concerning the Open Source question of the OS, I am not sure what to think. If we look at WinUAE, it's under a GNU General Public license,

[...] which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software. [...]

Except Toni, do you see a lot contributions to the code ? All questions here in EAB are redirected to Toni, and Toni, and Toni. I may be wrong but I do not see any other names being put forward (PS: for Toni & previous UAE developers ).

Will the situation be different for the OS if it was publicly available ? I don't know... But right now we have at least some people who have put their hands in the "grease" to try to make it better.

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by malko

it seems to me that the added value of Cloanto is very low in terms of Amiga OS for last decades.

Subtracted value I'd call it :-)

Will the situation be different for the OS if it was publicly available ? I don't know... But right now we have at least some people who have put their hands in the "grease" to try to make it better.

If the OS3.9 or OS4.1FE source code was available, that code would be worth working on. But we only have source for OS3.1, AROS etc. and working on those feels too much like reinventing the wheel.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbot

MUI vs. ReAction? It's unfortunate that either of them has effectively become a part of the OS

GadTools is awful, there is so much lacking.

[E-Penguin]

Originally Posted by malko

Hum... Maybe I'm forcing the line, but apart from trying to block emulation with DRM, it seems to me that the added value of Cloanto is very low in terms of Amiga OS for last decades.
Thus I am not sure (I only ask to be wrong) that such a company could bring anything new/positive even in a new holding.

Except that Cloanto have publicly stated their desire to put the Amiga OS out as open source lead by a nonprofit.

http://cloanto.org

[Minuous]

@E-Banana:

Except that since they claim to have had all the rights for years, they could have open sourced it years ago. Therefore obviously they have never had any intention of doing so; their actions speak louder than words.

Plus they don't have any source code to OS3.1.4/3.5/3.9/4 anyway and the OS3.1 source is already available.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by malko

Concerning the Open Source question of the OS, I am not sure what to think. If we look at WinUAE, it's under a GNU General Public license, Except Toni, do you see a lot contributions to the code ? All questions here in EAB are redirected to Toni, and Toni, and Toni.

While Toni is absolutely great: he did not start the UEA (Bernd Schmidt) nor WinUEA (Mathias Ortmann)
That is exactly the beauty of OSS - the original developers left, but someone capable came along and turned the "unusable" Amiga Emulator in probably the best retro-machine ever.

And there is of course Janus-UAE for AROS and Amibian...

[malko]

Originally Posted by Gorf

[...] the original developers left, but someone capable came along and turned the "unusable" Amiga Emulator in probably the best retro-machine ever. [...]

Unlike other people here I don't have the skills to help Thomas & Olaf with the code, but I support their action because I think it is beneficial to the whole Amiga community : even if it's only for hobby, who will really complain to have a more robust OS ?

Concerning what you said, regarding the OS 3.1.4, we can say the same : C= left and someone capable came along (Hyperion/Thomas/Olaf in this case) to turn it in a better OS. It's not perfect, but it's a good step.
Furthermore, bug fixes are already scheduled .

Let Hyperion/Thomas/Olaf continue their efforts.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by malko

Unlike other people here I don't have the skills to help Thomas & Olaf with the code, but I support their action because I think it is beneficial to the whole Amiga community : even if it's only for hobby, who will really complain to have a more robust OS ?

Concerning what you said, regarding the OS 3.1.4, we can say the same : C= left and someone capable came along (Hyperion/Thomas/Olaf in this case) to turn it in a better OS. It's not perfect, but it's a good step.
Furthermore, bug fixes are already scheduled .

Let Hyperion/Thomas/Olaf continue their efforts.

Well "Hyperion" did not really do anything, did they - good developers did.

and of course they should continue - in an open manner!

[malko]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Well "Hyperion" did not really do anything, did they [...]

If, so to speak, going to court to be "slapped" is not doing anything...
I am sure everybody let you go

[AMIGASYSTEM]

We continue to discuss but no one gives an answer to my request!

I repeat the question: Why with OS 3.1.4 the Startup-sequence does not stop if there is an incorrect command?

[McTrinsic]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

We continue to discuss but no one gives an answer to my request!

I repeat the question: Why with OS 3.1.4 the Startup-sequence does not stop if there is an incorrect command?

Well this has been answered. The shell currently has a bug there. Until a new version is out you can use Loadmodule with the shell-seg handler from Aminet (courtesy of ThoR) with the option 'downgrade' to revert to a fully error-aware shell.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by McTrinsic

Well this has been answered. The shell currently has a bug there. Until a new version is out you can use Loadmodule with the shell-seg handler from Aminet (courtesy of ThoR) with the option 'downgrade' to revert to a fully error-aware shell.

This only works for OS 3.9 owners, people who upgrade from 3.1 may not have the necessary version of shell available for patching.

A better option is to upload a patch for OS 3.1.4 Shell, which users can use to make a new fixed Shell-Seg. Why wait for a big update.

However, since it has been revealed that this instead will be worked around with SetPatch, one can only wonder if a fixed version of Shell ever will be released, or if all fixes from now on will come in the form of an ever growing SetPatch.

[gulliver]

Originally Posted by kolla

However, since it has been revealed that this instead will be worked around with SetPatch, one can only wonder if a fixed version of Shell ever will be released, or if all fixes from now on will come in the form of an ever growing SetPatch.

You dont get it:

SetPatch in 3.1.4 already has the ability to load Shell-Seg from disk. So this fix does not necessarily mean SetPatch has to grow. It can be delivered as a module and then SetPatch can then load it from disk.

Just to further expand: SetPatch job is not only to fix rom issues, it also fixes many hardware design issues that end up generating software issues. And then it does many other things too.

[utri007]

Originally Posted by gulliver

You dont get it:

OK, lets get to this, Kolla said setpatch is growing because you woun't fix Shell. So he basicly hinted that he knows what is happening, making some sort of statement (again), that you are making stupid desicions and are possible lazy? This is not criticsm, it is poisoning.

As it has a statement kind of nature, Gulliver feeled that he needed to comment/correct it?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by utri007

OK, lets get to this, Kolla said setpatch is growing because you woun't fix Shell. So he basicly hinted that he knows what is happening, making some sort of statement (again), that you are making stupid desicions and are possible lazy? This is not criticsm, it is poisoning.

As it has a statement kind of nature, Gulliver feeled that he needed to comment/correct it?

And as it turns out, Kolla was not wrong in his assumption:
If setpatch is growing or loading modules from disk now is no real difference - in both cases you need more "stuff" to fix a newly introduced problem...

[gulliver]

I believe there is too much fuss about something that is not that relevant:

There is a bug, the bug has been acknowledged, a solution has been found, and what I was trying to say, is that there are several ways to deliver the fix, not just one or two. And then the bugfix will be available in some form when we feel it is ready, not when someone else wants it.

You can allways agree to disagree and then simply move on like mature people do.

We should get back to the matter of the thread.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by gulliver

SetPatch in 3.1.4 already has the ability to load Shell-Seg from disk.

Woop woop, so LoadModule is redundant?
How do I tell SetPatch to load shell-seg 45.39 from disk? Will it be boot resident, or must SetPatch be copied around on all boot devices (omg all those ADFs...), or is this where LoadModule kicks in? Why can't SetPatch also not just replace intuition.library v45 as well?
And where is all this documented?

[kolla]

And more to the actual point of what I wrote, people who bought 3.1.4 as an upgrade to 3.1 do not necessarily have OS 3.9bb2 available to extract Shell-Seg from, to patch with the update from Aminet - why not offer a fixed shell-seg patch now, rather than wait till within "Q1 2019", aka April, aka just two more weeks, aka when it is ready, aka maybe Christmas. Maybe I am too sarcastic now, but from experience, this is what Hyperion projects are all about, announcing and postponing, those damn compile flags....

Following Window's example of not alowing windows larger than screen (for whatever exotic reasons), why not follow Window's example with updates every Tuesday? Not enough resources, not enough testers... well, all OS 3.1.4 owners are already testers, give them something to test.

And could I at least have the .cd files so I can fix those damn locales? Or how am I suppose to contribute? Oh, I need to sum up all the strings in a Word document or something?:

[Hewitson]

There's a number of reasons I am not willing to support 3.1.4 (unless it pops up on Bittorrent).

- Needing to purchase a version for each different machine (eg A2000 and A1200).

- STILL closed source.

- Something as basic as a shell not working properly. What other bugs are there?

- Massively overpriced.

[kolla]

I would happily pay more if it meant proper support, ie a bug tracker, tickets and frequent updates and good bug handling. Hyperion has had a few months to explain whether they consider using OS 3.1.4 on FPGA systems or emulation a breach of the software license, and to explain if one really is required to configure locales to geographical position of the system to be license compliant (yeah, really!), but as usual there are just crickets.