Probably this will be considered old story from many of my readers, however i thought at the end is still good to post it.
This article was started with a more innocent motive at the begin of September, then to shelve it due to my Family visit in Los Angeles at the end of September; however i feel that is necessary to bring the cat out of the bag; i will still keep the original subject.
At the time i considered myself flabbergasted from what happened at the begin of September on the Amigaworld.net Forum: it gaves me at first a sense of despair on how the equilibrium that is building among the flavors might stall in every moment just for a word or (in this case) a theme. Things started in fact regarding a picture posted by Serk118uk on this thread on aw.net regarding the new version of Annotate on AROS using a morphOs theme by RainCaller, Christopher ‘ChrisH’ Handley added this remark:
Apart from mistaking AROS for OS4 (from a quick glance), it now seems that I’m going to mistake AROS for MOS. Doesn’t that theme break some MOS copyright?
I would much rather AROS try to stand on it’s own feet, rather than try to ape another OS that is (in many but not all ways) better than it.
The discussion went on a bit before to be put back on-topic; however, CrisH did not quit and put the same question on AROS-EXEC in this thread; plus he created a spin-off thread again in amigaworld.net here.
Well this time am pretty pleased that the members of aw.net did not pay too much attention to the bickering of Chris, and its supposed idea that an amiga-like OS should not have skins of the competitors: since was possible, people always themed their oses, is more a sort of tribute than aping (people who can skin their OSes are a little bit more computer-literate) and, especially in the Amiga and like world, almost everybody know ups and downs of the other systems so they know is not the competitor, is just an aesthetic taste, not some malicious intent to deceive almost non-existing “n00bs”.
Point taken, i still feel saddened by those threads; is really the title the most appropriate in my opinion to see how sometimes people that support Amiga and its offspring (legitimate or not) ends up shooting themselves in the foot; whether we like it or not, Amiga technology is already considered a thing of the past and even the knowledge related is slowly disappearing; so why still behave like it is still relevant whether a desktop environment is ‘genuine’ or ‘polluted’ from the other like-os and all this overzealous bickering?
Honestly amigans and like have IMO more relevant problems to solve: the original hardware and the accessories in example are starting to wear out; fortunately there are still some vendors that can provide original material, but in example is hard to replace or purchase an accelerator card or a graphic board non-standard such as picasso or bvision without ending on the huindreds of dollars/euros/pounds depending where are you located; despite this, ideas for replacement boards or alternate accelerator cards are substantially non existants or dead in the water, either for lack of documentation, for hard-to-understand still ongoing NDAs and limitations imposed from old hardware producers and, finally, for an absolutely crazy individualistic and ego-profit driven tendence of the amiga hardware designers that tend to keep progresses on their own personal projects secret and not to share with the community; recently following this thread i stumble in the pages of Majsta, a serbian(?) Amiga user that is working on its own accelerator card for A600 via FPGA; in the page Sharing he mention its own opinion, that i find pretty appropriated for this topic:
I just don’t understand Amiga community. First of all we are in situation that things are stuck for 20 years or so and people who know something want’s to keep that private. For what ??? They just don’t want to share any ideas or knowledge or experience.
For past 2 years there are only few people who wanted to help me. Others just told me something like “You want to someone do all the work for you” or “Code speaks for itself don’t need explanation???”. Also those ones who created something related to Amiga hardware spend lot of time on most Amiga forums just to laugh at my work instead of giving support and sharing knowledge.
That is the main reason why Amiga is going nowhere.
I was thinking that they would like to see that someone want’s to join them to work hard and share ideas. And if this situation continues Amiga will become nice memory and nothing more. In all my work regarding to PC, electronics, networks people wanted to help and all my life I helped others to learn but here in Amiga scene people are different.
And there is about 100 forums where I shared my knowledge and every time I found some solution I post it so people can learn from it so that they don’t need to waste time and to continue their work. Working on this accelerator I spend thousand hours to do something that someone could do for only 10 minutes and still they didn’t want to take that 10 minutes for me.
But they didn’t understand that this work is not for me that this work is for all Amiga community.
They can’t understand that era of money earning from and for Amiga is gone forever but if we unite we can do something. Few people are working on Amiga hardware and for them all others are just stupid to enter their circles and they don’t want to waste their time to anyone who want’s to work hard.
I started this project without any knowledge related to Amiga accelerators and Amiga hardware and now I m in situation to know lot of things. There are no open hard&soft databases. Where are the people who worked on old projects??? They only write something on the forums and laugh at those who are trying to create anything. They don’t have will to start new projects or share ideas regarding old ones…
So Amiga community is just Talk Talk community.
A similar project on its preliminary steps (forum in italian) met a problem in which to save time they tried to use a more recent version of the minimig core but seemed that the minimig forum either removed the link or the forum tiself became read only.
Still about the ego clash is difficult not to remember what happened to the Amiga Guru Book in 2008, or some limiting licenses to open sourced components (Warp 3d in example with a license that forbid its use on mos and AROS); however in a way or another i already discussed those topics, but the main persisting question is when we Amigans will put down our weapons and our flags and just enjoy our hobby platform, whatever incarnation is, without belittling ourselves and others?
binarydoodles 