Speech read out by Guy Nathan, aka. Cyberwlf at Australian Amiga Gathering 1997, held in Sydney between the 28th and 29th of June this year. --------------------------------------------------------------- Hello Fellow Amigans, Future Amigans, Non-computer owners, ohh.. and also PC and Mac owners. Welcome to Australian Amiga Gathering 1997. All the manuals on speech making say that you have to start with a joke. Unfortunately the organisers wouldn't let me bring up a PC joke here so instead, I thought I'd tell you one another one. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A couple was golfing one day on a very, very exclusive golf course, lined with million dollar houses. On the third tee the husband said, "Honey, be very careful when you drive the ball, don't knock out windows from any of these houses. It'll cost us a fortune to fix." The wife teed up and hit it right through the window of the biggest House on the course. The husband cringed and said, "I told you to watch out for the houses! Alright, let's go up there, apologize and see how much this thing is going to cost." They walked up, knocked on the door, and heard a voice say, "Come on in." They opened the door and saw glass all over the floor, and a broken bottle lying on its side in the foyer. A man on the couch said, "Are you the people that broke my window?" "Uh, yeah. Sorry about that." the husband replied. "No, I want to thank you - I'm a genie which was trapped for a thousand years in that bottle. You've released me. I'm allowed to grant you three wishes - I'll give you each one wish, and I'll keep the last one for myself." "OK, great!" the husband said. "I want a million dollars a year for the rest of my life." "No problem - it's the least I could do. And you, what do you want?" the genie said, looking at the wife. "I want a house in every country of the world," she said. "Consider it done." the genie replied. "And what's your wish, genie?", the husband said. "Well, since I've been trapped in that bottle, I haven't had sex with a woman in a thousand years. My wish is to sleep with your wife." The husband looks at the wife and said, "Well, we did get a lot of money and all those houses, honey. I guess I don't care if you don't." The genie took the wife upstairs and ravished her for two hours. After it was over, the genie rolled over, looked at the wife, and said, "How old is your husband, anyway?" "35." she replied. "And he still believes in genies...that's amazing!" --------------------------------------------------- And so what is the relevance of this to the Amiga? Believe it or not it is very relevant. Ever since the purchase of Amiga Technologies, many people have been sending emails and news articles, snail mail and phone calls across the Planet celebrating the fact that the Amiga now has its own Genie, Gateway 2000, a huge, technology savvy, money loaded success story. They are dragging the money boxes out from under their beds waiting for the imminent arrival of the $500 quad processor RISC Amiga running Amiga OS 4.0. They truly believe that Gateway 2000 is the Amiga's own, special, magical genie. It is not. (Transperancy 1) Early in April of this year, the Jay Miner Society, a group dedicated to the furtherance of the Amiga through positive action, after months of Consulting with noted Amiga developers and users launched phase one of the Industry Council and Open Amiga (ICOA) initiative. It's purpose was to form a core team that would explore and distill the twin ideas of an Amiga specific Industry Council and the floating of the next generation Amiga operating system as an Open architecture. On 8th May 1997, an official letter was dispatched to Gateway and on the 11th, they formally replied with a 45 minute phone conference. The results were as follows; 1 - a promise that they would mention us in their speech at the World of Amiga press conference in London, which they did (and which Petro repeated in Atlanta) 2 - that they could not formally endorse us until we were a real concrete entity but that did not mean that they would not formally endorse us in the future. Phase two of the ICOA was launched at the DevCon at the World of Amiga show on the Saturday. A public presentation was made by one of the JMS members, Ben Hutchinson, explaining to the world the purpose of the initiative. In the five weeks since the DevCon, almost a thousand individuals and Companies have registered either their support or their wish to be involved in the ICOA phase 2 initiative. (Transperancy 2) The centre piece of phase 2 was an invite only mailing list for every Developer who registered, along with a few of the more noted users - the purpose, to discuss how we could bring all of the different Amiga developers spread across the world together into a strong and focused forum which would allow the platform to advance. Last monday, on the 24 June a Transitional Steering Committee was elected by the list - it consists of: A: Alain Penders of Finale-Dev (Amiga browsers and Java) B: Andy Finkel (AmigaOS and Pios) C: Dean Brown (DKB peripherals and boards) D: Fleecy Moss (Project Manager and Distributed systems designer for IBM) E: Jesse McCluskey, head of Alternative Concepts, Inc. And will sit for a fixed period of 6 months from 11July97 - 11Jan98. It's mandate is to turn the Industry Council (IC) into a real structure using the Living Document that the maiiling list has been working on as a guide and to engage Gateway 2000 / Amiga International in formal discussions as to how both parties can work together towards the rebirth of the Amiga. Crucial to the success of the IC will be its acceptance by Gateway 2000 and Amiga International. The Transitional Steering Committee will make an approach to the owners as soon as it can and hopes to have a detailed and lengthy Face To Face session with them as soon as possible, both to invite them to sit on the IC and to allow the IC structures to be finely tuned to the needs of the future. We hope for this to happen in the next month. OK, down to the basics, what will the Industry Council and the Open Amiga mean to you as developers and you as users? The purpose of the IC is to create a formal, fully resourced organisation in which those people who are most able can come together to further the Amiga, will have an opportunity to do so. This will be done at a high level by an elected Steering Committee, on which the owners will be invited to sit as a non voting member with a veto. This will act as a guiding force through the production of short, medium and long term strategies. At a lower, day to day level, it will be done through the action of Working Groups. A Working Group starts by a member or group of members petitioning the Steering Committee with a plan to focus on a certain area of the Amiga platform. This could be anything from a new file format, a browser plug in interface or a Networking protocol. The Steering Committee will look at the petition, assessing such things as benefits, viability, impact on existing practices and companies and then either grant the petition or reject it. Once granted, a Working Group becomes live and must work to the submitted schedule. Any member of the IC can join any Working Group and every WG is fully open to all other members. When finished, the Working Group will put its deliverables before the whole IC for adoption. In this way, the IC hopes to build up a freely available, public set of open standards. There will be no licencing fee and no coercion. They will be recommendations only. We hope developers will use them both because they will have been created by the developers themselves and because those in the IC will implement them into their own products. In this way we hope to mimic the success of the Internet Engineering Task Force and its published Requests For Comments (RFCs) The Industry Council is not about bureaucracy or dictatorship - developers are being involved from the start to ensure that the Industry Council is THE most streamlined, efficient structure that there can be for meaningful co-operation amongst developers and positive advancement of the Amiga platform. There was much talk on the mailing list about who should be allowed to join and who should not. In the end, we seem to be moving towards the elegant approach of peer judgment, in which a prospective member will be judged by those already in the IC as to whether they can make a positive contribution to the Amiga within the IC. This was seen as much fairer than drawing lines on commercial or shareware or PD or platform supported statuses. To keep the IC from becoming bogged down, ALL user input will be collected, distilled and channeled via the Jay Miner Society. A special mechanism will be setup by the JMS to ensure that all the noise is kept out and all the good ideas, Criticisms, suggestions and questions get through. Individual users and developers who can not spare the time will be able to join as affiliates. This will allow the IC to carry on its work but allows those who are interested access to a package of extra peripheral benefits (Newsletter, Developer and standards CD, maybe access to the Working Group in progress webpages). So what is Open Amiga and what are its benefits? This has been a low priority on the mailing list as it was agreed early on that the proper place to talk about such a topic would be in the IC itself and so all effort has been put into the IC at the expense of the Open Amiga. Put briefly, the idea is to free the Amiga Operating system from its attachment to proprietary hardware implementations, allowing it to bloom across multiple different platforms, whether they be 68K legacy, PPC, Intel, Unix, Embedded Controller, even Mainframe. Such a move would allow any third party hardware manufacturer to simply write a HAL to the published specification and then the Open Amiga operating SYStem (OASYS) would be able to run on it. Thus the ABox, the Pios One and existing 68K machines should theoritically be capable of running the new OASYS. Although this is only in the discussion phase at the moment, we have already talked about Intelligent HALs, the Open Software Foundation's Architecturally Neutral Distributable Format (ANDF), standardised Dynamic Object Data ports, Pre-emptive Memory Protection solutions and methods of addressing backwards compatibility. Of course, the manifestation of these ideas into the Open Amiga operating SYStem (OASYS) is very much dependent upon the stand that Gateway and Amiga International take and whilst the IC will quickly develop its own ideas, plans and strategies, we hope to involve the owners from the start to ensure quick movement. In the end, the Industry Council will succeed or fail based upon the amount of involvment and participation in it by the developer community. We are more than aware that in the past, non North American and European areas seem to have been almost completely ignored both by the owners and by other so called Amiga groups. This is not the stance that the IC will take. To us, the Amiga community is as real as any community and all its members, wherever they are, should have access to, and participation in the events and decision making processes that affect that community. Please accept these apologies from the Steering Commitee's Fleecy Moss for not having been able to make this speech to you himself - as he was unable to go to the World of Amiga either. Until we are a real organisation, we have very little money and unfortunately it's money and not good looks that buys plane tickets (although looks would only have got him to the terminal toilets anyway) Gateway are quite frankly shocked to have bought the Amiga, turned it over and found a vibrant, passionate, buzzing community alive and kicking. They are at a loss over what to do and are looking for partners to help them. This is a unique opportunity for the community itself to step up, offer its muscle and sweat, and work together both with each other and with the owners to achieve what, in the end, we all want to achieve, the Amiga back on top of the computer mountain. Please support the Industry Council - there is a link on the JMS webpage, www.jms.org Please continue to support and believe in the Amiga. It is you the people, who have kept the AMIGA alive in the absence of a responsible owner. In the end, we, all of us, ARE the Amiga. Thank you. (C) Copyright of ICOA