Official membership has reached the 200 mark, and covers a broad spectrum of developers, organisations, and companies, with more waiting to drift in and make themselves comfortable at the appropriate moment. Operating system and application developers, hardware developers, retailers, visionaries, artists and musicians: some of whom will be familiar names to Amigas users the world over, others hoping to carve their own fame over the coming months. The operating system line-up itself shows just how important an all-inclusive Phoenix is becoming. Amiga and QNX are probably the most familiar OS developers signed up for the Phoenix experience, but there are also offerings from developments such as MorphOS and Dolphin all expanding their support and horizons through the consortium... with more waiting behind the curtains.
QNX Neutrino in particular is gearing up for a public release in the next few weeks as part of the recent "Get QNX" programme. The software is just undergoing final checks as I write this article, QNX taking their quality assurance very seriously, and I know for one that there are a lot of developers eagerly awaiting its arrival - their offer of 5000 free CDs was swamped pretty soon after launch... I'm hoping I managed to get my name on the list in time! QNX are really making a big push to take themselves further into the growing "Internet Appliances" and digital convergence markets, as well as tackling the desktop arena through the support and effort of Phoenix. A few notable Amiga developers have already taken advantage of the Neutrino beta-testing programme to ready ports of their software for this exciting RTOS.
As you should all be aware by now, Amiga are also gearing up for their initial Linux-hosted development boxes and software-only options. Amiga are actually making the QNX-move in reverse, in a way. As we're all aware, the Amiga makes an excellent desktop machine and successfully transferred to the very tip of the digital convergence iceberg, long before such a thing was recognised. Amiga have extrapolated from where the Amiga was aiming prior to the Commodore bankruptcy, added more to the ideas, and set a course to broaden the Amiga experience and technology. This means a move into the important IA
