@hth313

Unlike Copyright issues, an owner of a trademark is obliged to take actions against any violation on their rights immediately, or else they risk losing that rights. This is what Mike Battilana is doing here, defending his property, as he must do. When it comes to Copyright violations, you (as an owner) are free to either react immediately or not. You don’t lose your Copyright if you don’t defend it. And you don’t give up your rights to act at a later point either, should you desire to.


@kolla

Any and all rights to the 3.1 sources that Hyperion may have gotten from Amiga Inc (explicitly for the creation of 4.x, and explicitly NOT for new releases of 3.x), is now owned by Mike Battilanas companies. Excluding Olsens GCC rewrite/port of course, which is the only usable sources in practice (without them you would have to begin with creating your own port/rewrite to a contemporary programming language and toolchain before any real development could start), but on the the other hand his rewrite is based on Battilanas copyrights and can never be separated from it. It’s a shared copyright. Actual access to the sources shouldn’t be a problem. They were leaked all over the community and many (most?) people have them now. If Battilana missed downloading them, he should PM some users here. But it would make a lot more sense and probably be a lot easier to just get Olsen &Co on board. This is probably what will happen in a not too distant future.

@kolla
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ThoR wrote that "they" (he?) did approach Cloanto, but were told by Mike that only Hyperion sits on the actual source tree of OS 3.1.

I don't remember him saying that. It would be wrong anyway, because Cloanto is known to have a big archive of Commodore stuff, and pretty much everyone sits on the "actual source tree of OS 3.1".

Thor said multiple times that he was approached by Hyperion and agreed to do it. When questioned about Cloanto, he stated they couldn't have helped him anyway because 3.1.4 contains several components backported from OS4, and Cloanto couldn't have provided these.

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Remember, when Hyperion were granted rights to use OS 3.1 sources for OS4 development, Amiga Inc. were unable to provide the source code, so Hyperion had to find them elsewhere, which they did. [...] After the settlement, Hyperion see the OS3.1 sources as their own, a subset of the OS4 sources, and continued to refuse anyone else, including the actual IP owners, access.

The problem is not finding the sources, they have been leaked multiple times in the last 20+ years. If you can't find them on your favourite torrent site, go ask the MorphOS team. I'm sure they can help out

But a copy of the old CBM source archives won't do you much good - to compile them, you need a rather exotic setup involving Sun workstations and a 30 year old proprietary Green Hills compiler. Olsen is the one who reworked that in the nineties, to make it compile using SAS/C and GCC. This (extensive) work is still the property of Olsen. He only licensed it to Hyperion, and AFAIK, he never got fully paid anyway.

Olsen's reworked 3.1 sources are also the base for the official OS4 source tree, which Olsen used to be managing anyway. Hyperion could certainly block other people from using that., but that has nothing to do with refusing other parties access to the 3.1 sources - they can't do that, neither legally nor technically.

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With OS4 finished (to some degree)

I love your optimism.

Last edited by cgutjahr on 19-Jul-2019 at 03:14 PM.

@kolla

Quote:

kolla wrote: @hth313 From what I recall when OS 3.1.4 was announced (but I have not found the actual post, if it was on amiga.org, eab or a1k) ThoR wrote that "they" (he?) did approach Cloanto, but were told by Mike that only Hyperion sits on the actual source tree of OS 3.1. Remember, when Hyperion were granted rights to use OS 3.1 sources for OS4 development, Amiga Inc. were unable to provide the source code, so Hyperion had to find them elsewhere, which they did. With OS4 finished (to some degree), Hyperion were supposed to hand sources back to Amiga Inc, but this never happened, both parties claiming the other had broken the contract etc. After the settlement, Hyperion see the OS3.1 sources as their own, a subset of the OS4 sources, and continued to refuse anyone else, including the actual IP owners, access. Hyperion has been strangling any OS3 development for more than 15 years.

Odd that they wouldn't have been just been allowed to pull a copy from some source control server... (Olsen's)
I mean it's not like sources are imprinted on Sumerian cylinder seals...

Last edited by Lou on 19-Jul-2019 at 01:56 PM.