At the End

Developer kit and protection of the brand - two important Amiga themes these days

These days, AMIGA fulfill their announcement from April 1st and ship the developer kit. So an important step up to the development of the Next Generation Amiga has been made: From now on, any developer can port his software to the new system or write all new programs. Already at the beginning, the developer kit offers various programming languages - and after some time more implementations will follow.

AMIGA is currently creating a number of support structures to help programmers and to ensure the required coordination of the development efforts. But now, it's up to the coders, who wrote software for the current Amiga and partially still do: The more programmers develop for the AmigaNG before it is available, the larger is the strategic advantage, which is already present compared with the other new operating system developments. Because, often a good operating system fails due to the little choice of software. And this must not happen to the new Amiga operating system in any case!

Another theme, which became important during the last weeks and didn't make just a few Amiga users angry, is the brand protection policy of AMIGA. To make it short: The company has no other choice, than to take care about the useage of their brand. Else there is the danger, that due to US-law, the company might loose the claim to the brand "Amiga", so a completely different product of any manufacturer could be sold with this name - there would be a big damage for AMIGA. Not for nothing the company paid millions of US-Dollars mainly for the name of the brand "Amiga". By the way, there were different cases in other countries: E.g. in Germany there was the name "Selters", which was formerly a copyrighted name, until the name became more and more the synonym for "mineral water". The consequence was, that the protection of the brand was cancelled against the resistence of the manufacturer.

After this short trip, back to AMIGA. Those, who use or want to use the brand or logo for an own project has to have the permission of the company. Desired eMails are to send to gary@amiga.com containing the subject "Trademark".

By the way, AMIGA-aktuell (International) already did this and the permission for using logo and brand are made quick and without bureaucracy.

In matters of our own I want to direct your attention to a survey, which is very important for the future of this magazine and which is included in this edition of AMIGA aktuell International. I ask ALL of you to have some minutes and to participate. Thank you.

See you next month,

yours

Carsten Schroeder