I'm not convinced this represents a major U-turn, though despite protests from Amiga this does seem to represent a minor change of direction. But change is good, I'd rather see minor course changes like this than wait and wait and then find out that no one had realised they were steering in totally the wrong direction. The good news is that the whole memory protection situation will now be resolved, AmigaDE will retain the lack of protection inherent with the Tao kernel, the AmigaOS will gradually gain the MP that is essential for modern desktop and server roles. It seems Amiga have found the balance they were looking for.
Some people have complained about the fact that a PowerPC native, AmigaOS compatible operating system is already available: MorphOS. Why not build upon that? I don't know the real reasons though I get the impression there have been a few 'issues' behind the scenes - best to leave it at that without the full facts. I would also guess the fact of the matter is AmigaOS belongs to Amiga already.
It should be noted, however, that I was a little disappointed to also hear some early comments over the legalities of certain OS developments with AmigaOS compatibility. In retrospect this seems to have been down to the general miscommunication leading up to the official announcements, that all parties are in communication and that there's not much to this after all. By all means, Amiga have to protect their interests, but competition between AmigaOS and compatible developments is surely a healthy thing? With AmigaOS 4.0 underway for PowerPC, AROS now booting natively on x86 hardware (nice one guys!) and potential for other CPUs, MorphOS looking very interesting indeed (and still only beta), the whole environment is starting to look good and I hope they all prosper.
People still see many of these as fierce competitors and unhealthy mindshare-grabbing, but in actual fact they're complementary when you think about it. Amiga software developers would be wise to, hardware
