@hazydave

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Now, I do not have direct personal knowledge of all MorphOS sources. But back when Phase 5 was working on their "C Exec" and other things, starting to re-create AmigaOS themselves in the mid-1990s, I was working with Andy Finkel at Amiga Technologies. The Phase 5 guys were really after AT to use tome of their stuff (and pay them, natch). Andy did a code review of the C Kernel, and found it was copied from AmigaOS source code. In fact, even the comments were copied, assembler to C.

Didn't Amiga Technologies (Petro Tschytschenko) send AmigaOS source code to random developers over the world? I recall Olaf Barthel received a copy (just like many others) even when he didnt ask one.

I can send you some AROS source code just for fun of it. Should keep you away from Amiga developments forever... shouldnt it?

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I wouldn't trust anyone involved in Phase 5, or any code that can be traced back to Phase 5.

I would not trust anyone involved with the official Amiga after 1994.

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They still don't understand clean room development. If you have seen the Amiga source code, you cannot produce a legally separate work-alike.

By your logic AmigaOS dirty because they have used AROS source code. AmigaOS developers have contributed to AROS and AROS developers have contributed to AmigaOS. AROS developers have contributed to MorphOS and MorphOS developers have contributed to AROS.

So by you logic AmigaOS is dirty. In fact at least one ex-MorphOS developer (who didnt commit much AFAIK) contributes to OS4.

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Maybe MorphOS is clean, maybe not. Maybe no one actually knows. But that's such a transgression, I wouldn't trust anyone involved in Phase 5, or any code that can be traced back to Phase 5.

Maybe you are on drugs, maybe not. You can not prove you are not. Oops!

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Point in fact -- I just don't care about MorphOS. It's not AmigaOS, it might as well be Windows for all I care.

That is fine. I didnt care about Met@box.

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If the MorphOS people would like to swear in public that not a line of code or comment is copied from the AmigaOS sources or derived from the Phase 5 code (fruits of a poisonous tree, in legal terms), I will not mention MorphOS again.

I can swear I have not seen any trace of AmigaOS source code or comments in MorphOS code. But then I only have an access to parts of MorphOS I'm developing. I have seen AROS source code and comments in the source (localization stuff for example).

On the other hand I developed closed source Multiview 2 for MorphOS seeing AROS implementation of Multiview first (which was part of MorphOS 1.x). Does it fall under APL now? I can assure it does not contain AROS comments or AROS code but I wont let non-MorphOS developers review it. If someone wont like it, too bad. I dont care.

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Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@hazydave

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The MorphOS project came from Phase V... after Phase V ended, former employees started up BPlan (eg, "Plan B"), who eventually merged with a couple folks from Thendic France to form Genesi.

Bplan, Thendic and Genesi were separate companies. There was never any merger between them. Thendic was going to be renamed to Genesi but it was forced into bankruptcy in 2004. Bplan and Genesi both still exist.

I believe you're correct in saying MorphOS originated with Phase 5.

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Now, I do not have direct personal knowledge of all MorphOS sources. But back when Phase 5 was working on their "C Exec" and other things, starting to re-create AmigaOS themselves in the mid-1990s, I was working with Andy Finkel at Amiga Technologies. The Phase 5 guys were really after AT to use tome of their stuff (and pay them, natch). Andy did a code review of the C Kernel, and found it was copied from AmigaOS source code. In fact, even the comments were copied, assembler to C.

At the time Amiga technologies were seemingly sending their code to all and sundry. I've never heard any talk of NDAs so I'll assume there wasn't one involved.
If this was copied, could it have been done with AT's knowledge or permission?
i.e. Did AT give and Amiga sources to Phase5?

The question then is how does this relate to MorphOS.
Did that code get into MorphOS?

If yes, then the MorphOS team might have IP contamination issues. However, I doubt it because this would have been very old code by the time MorphOS was even started and MorphOS uses a different kernel anyway (MorphOS was always intended to add things like SMP and full memory protection at some point so the low level architecture is quite different).

The other question is, did anyone who has seen AmigaOS source work on MorphOS.
The answer to this is more complex, because it depends on the time elapsed between seeing the AmigaOS code and then working on MorphOS. As I understand it there shouldn't be any IP issues because MorphOS wasn't started until years later.

I'm no expert on this but I do know people (in a completely different context) who have been "IP contaminated" and had to go and work on something else for a period of months before they could come back to work on something related.

It should be pointed out however that MorphOS was never created as an alternative or to compete with AmigaOS. When MorphOS was started AmigaOS had been cancelled and declared dead.

The Haiku guys did the same exactly thing, they loved BeOS and wanted it to continue, Be died so they did it themselves.

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Whyzzat?