Promised contribs of OS4 OpenLinux team

vox wrote:

Q) What is the status of the trademarks?
A) We have registered and filed with the USPTO, the names, Amiga OpenLinux, Amiga Enterprise Linux and Amiga Education System.

1. they are indeed renaming their linux distribution 'amiga' and they have not in any way secured the amiga trademark or licensed any of the marks whatsoever. they just consider it abandoned and are taking it for themselves. roberto stated he was registering the mark with the USPTO to make it official.

2. he believes his distro is the most user friendly, cutting-edge distro out there. but after reviewing an installation in virtualbox, it feels like a warmed over version of xubuntu with little more than modifications to install scripts, changed graphics, etc. he keeps hinting at a large user community, and even stated they have around 12,000 users. but there are no public mailing lists, no public fora, and a grand total of 580 downloads of his distro ISOs at sourceforge.net. over the past two years. to put that in perspective, the OS4 utility sysmon has had over 4100 downloads. i thought, OK, huge community and following, right? let's check out google trends. they have search numbers for AmigaOS and MorphOS, surely they will for this linux distro. nope. not enough search volume over any period in google's dataset. this isn't conclusive by any means, but it doesn't really line up with claims of thousands of active users.

3. the business roberto runs , PC-opensystems, has five employees currently, all of whom have executive titles: CEO, COO, CTO, V.P. of product development, etc. they also have 'partners' like dell and acer. but that's not quite accurate as they pay for the privilege to resell their kit, like any other local PC shop. between the two it sounds like they're trying to seem bigger than they really are -- something which really reminds me of CUSA.

4. in addition to their linux distro they offer off-the-shelf hardware, re-badged, with linux, and sold for a hefty premium. the systems they offer can be had on amazon or even direct from their original manufacturers for hundreds less. again, shades of CUSA. there are certainly a lot of promises being made by roberto, but based on their apparent lack of knowledge about developing in and for AOS, i really doubt their ability to deliver much of anything. do they just look at the amiga name and logos as free for the taking to sell linux barely modified on retail hardware rebadged for a huge premium? also i found it odd that every answer he gave during the IRC session felt like rehearsed "business-speak" with few specifics. there did not seem to be any real answers to serious questions posed, and they have no real experience whatsoever in developing on AOS, or any AOS-like environment. to be brutally honest my first reaction was that the whole thing sounded rather like overly optimistic horse***t. if you're interested, i've mirrored the IRC log from this evening's chat (link). i'm not sure there is much point in reading through all of it, but knock yourselves out. it's still early days, and my memories are somewhat tainted by the CUSA experience, but in the end there are two classes of 'amiga' groups around here: there are those who deliver (hyperion, acube, A-EON, MOS team, AROS devs) and then there are those that talk. they talk about how they'll do this, and they'll do that, and how wonderful things will be once they've solved all the problems for us since they have 'leet skillz. roberto says he'll be at amiwest, and also mentions cooperation with A-EON. so for now i'll just hope my reaction is unfounded; i look forward to see what happens between now and the get-together in sacramento. i'm sure everyone else does as well.

vox wrote:

Full list of promises

This man was a thinker, a PR genius and one of the key leaders of the Commodore and Amiga communities.

Start time July 1st, 2013 Platforms supported: AmigaOne X1000, legacy PPC Macs, namely G4 and G5. Completion date: Estimated, January 2014 with first Beta being released November 2013 Goals: Simplify PPC install. We want to make it as easy for PPC install as it is for x86 installs. Provide emulation layer to run Amiga OS apps. Evaluate and port if possible, the Ambient Desktop to PPC OS4 OpenLinux, project starting January 2014. Provide the same ease of use for PowerPC as x86, customers and users have access to all multimedia codecs and advanced development tools for high end users.