Wait a tick... Amiga.org was sold? Again?

[whabangmk2]

Yeah, it's been harder and harder to find Amiga-relevant content the last few years - what content is there is being spread thin amidst flamewars and Apple fanboyism. Everyone has a different opinion about how things should be, so the community gets more and more fragmented.

I have all respect for Hyperion and the MorphOS devs, but I truly believe that if someone had simply bought it all for the patents in the late 90's, dumped the OS sources as open-source, and then let the company die in peace, we would have had a much more stable and vibrant community.

Alas, it is too late to change the past.

 

[JoBBo]

For the record, anyone who posts anything publicly on a Web site owned by someone else, then expects that they own the content they just gave to the universe is a bit naive. It doesn't matter what the rules say, or what is declared in legalese.

Most forums, including amiga.org, collect plenty of data / content that is not generally shared with the public. This includes highly personal information such as email addresses as well as private messages between members, which may contain postal addresses and payment information when people are trading items, and posts to private forums, which may contain language or viewpoints that people would never share in public.

Clearly, there is an implicit level of trust between a forum´s maintainer and its members, which often grows over time. Personally, I find it perfectly understandable that people might feel uncomfortable when somebody abrupty sells an entire website with potentially sensitive private information to a third party that refuses to be identified OR to a commercial entity with an (at least initially) unspecified agenda.

I can't -- obviously -- speak for what Bill did, or did not do when he sold it to whomever Trevor happens to be, but I faced a lot of the same whining and argument when I originally sold Amiga.org to BillP. People climbing out of the woodwork to claim that I had no right to sell the site at all and so-forth.

After people spent years helping to build an online community, it is normal for them feel emotionally attached to it and to be protective of the status quo. A new site management can very well bring changes that might ruin the experience for some members.

A lot of the "whining", as you describe it, is a symptom of people being emotionally invested in an online community. If there was no emotional attachment, there would be nothing to sell.

 

[Cyberus]

Wow, its developed into a real shitstorm over at A.org in the last few days.

By all means go and have a look, but its very sad to watch. Kind of validates what I said though - that it never was as good as under the original owner and that he would be absolutely mad to get involved in the 'community' again...