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[asian1]

Hello
Imagine the future of Amiga computing 5 year from now. What will happen?

There is a joke about Yugoslavia / Balkan: after the bloody war, the country is broken to 9 states and each new state want 1 alphabet from the old country. This process is called "Balkanization".

I am afraid similar thing will happen to the small A.M.I.G.A. community in the future:

A: AmigaOS 4, AmigaOS 3, Amithlon, Umilator, UAE.
M: MorphOS (Quark kernel)
I: Intel X86 CPU (ie Amithlon, AROS).
G: G3 and G4 based PowerPC machines.
A: AROS.

(Perhaps in the future ColdFire or PowerPC 970).
I guess no one except "real Amiga die hard" will use 68K machines in the distant future.

This will drive crazy any developer who want to port their software to Amiga platform. Perhaps OpenAmiga is the best choice to unite all the above platforms, because software based on OpenAmiga standard will be compatible with all the above OS and also CPU Independent (ie it can be re-compiled for different CPU platforms without any problems).

What is your opinion about the Balkanization of Amiga?

[Djole_]

Just to correct you it's 5 states now what Yugoslavia used to be....

[SamuraiCrow]

AmigaOS 4.2 will incorporate AmigaDE so there's no need to mess with OpenAmiga. BTW Amiga OS 5 is supposed to be portable to any AmigaDE supported platform when it shows up. The generation 4.0 Amiga standard is just a work in progress leading up to a grand solution.

[alx]

AmigaOS 4.2 will incorporate AmigaDE so there's no need to mess with OpenAmiga.

Yes, but the DE isn't suited for everything, and doesn't run on Classic Amiga or MOS. The whole idea with OpenAmiga is that software can be run on any of these platforms. I've never got AROS going properly, and I don't particularly like MOS, but I can still see the avantages of OpenAmiga.

Besides, OS4 isn't out yet, so it's a bit early to be talking about OS4.2 or even 5 :-D

[Terminills]

@SamuraiCrow

if you don't like the idea behind openamiga by all means don't use it. However don't say there's no need for it until you know the whole concept behind it. As for AmigaDE I'd rather AmigaOS run on top of that to broaden the reach of openamiga. :-D

[mikeymike]

One problem with 'OpenAmiga' is that it rates compatibility over performance and functionality. Legacy support is something that the platform needs to throw off as much as possible, if it's going to compete against the big players one day. OpenAmiga sounds to me like the unbelievably complicated legacy support exhibited in Mac OS X.

[Terminills]

@mikeymike

as far as I can tell by the idea's floating around... It's not about legacy it's about portability. All of the chosen API's are available for each system. Given that fact an openamiga compliant program would need only a recompile or slight modifications to take advantage of the enhancements of each platform.

[Dan]

AmigaOS 4.2 will incorporate AmigaDE so there's no need to mess with OpenAmiga. BTW Amiga OS 5 is supposed to be portable to any AmigaDE supported platform when it shows up. The generation 4.0 Amiga standard is just a work in progress leading up to a grand solution.

When AmigaOS 4.2 gets developed there won´t be any Amig Inc anymore and therefor no DE. DE doesn´t have anything todo with real Amigas anyway.
I suppose that in the future it will easiest to develop on a completed AROS for the OpenAmiga standard and then port to the other platforms.
Otherwise we are stuck in WB 3.1 :-(

I say to all the doubters. Keep your eyes peeled. OpenAmiga SDK v0.1 will be released to testers sometime in July. :-)