This little piece may be a bit late but I wasn't around when the actual announcment was made and now, just after the World of Amiga show had eneded seems as good a time as any to say what I think about the whole situtaion....

To me, the announcment was quite a shock to say the least. There we were, looking forward to what seemed to be a great, revolutionary OS, and then this, the announcment that the next Amiga is going to be nothing more then a tooled up Linux box, oh great. Don't get me wrong, Linux is a great OS, something which is proven by the fact that its userbase is growing all the time, however, if I had wanted to use Linux I would have done so a long time ago.

This announcment has to make you wonder if Amiga Inc were ever that serious about QNX at all, did they have plans to use Linux all along? Was announcing QNX just a cover by Amiga Inc so they could bide there time and get the Linux buniness into action without any hassle? Was buying Amiga just a plan by Gateway to gain easy access to the blooming Linux market? I know this might sound far fetched, however, can we really trust Amiga Inc anymore?

The way that all this was done was just bang out of order, one minute QNX thought they were going to spearhead the next Amiga and the next there out in the cold. Maybe i'm missing something here but QNX really did seem the way forward, it looks to be everything that Amiga users would want in an OS, QNX really were excited about the prospects they were facing.

What now for QNX then? Well, as you probably know, they have joined up with Phase5 and will continue working on their OS for use with future products from Phase5 and maybe even current boards. They are a friendly company that really seems to care about its community, I met a few of them at the recent World of Amiga show and they really did seem quite excited about what lies ahead in the future. Something one person said at the recent show really sums up things quite nicely, this was 'if I wanted to program for Linux I would have done so a long time ago' hopefully other deveopers will see things this way and the future Amiga along with QNX will be a success. That is, the future Amiga that will come from elsewhere other then Amiga Inc, because, lets face it, that ain't an Amiga anymore...

I'll end this with one last question, Do Amiga Inc really give a shit about the Amiga users or were they just a stepping stone onto bigger things, I mean, they've got the Linux crowd behind them now, why do you need the Amiga folk?

Then again, maybe i'm just being pesamistic and what Amiga Inc is doing is the right way forward, well, we can only hope....

David Flaherty
Amiga Nutta Editor

Got any views on this? Why not post them to the mailing list or send them to me and i'll put them up on the page, would be interesting to see what other people think.

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