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kolla wrote: A settlement agreement where the parties cannot agree on what was settled, is pretty much void.

Contracts would be useless if disagreement was sufficient to void a contract.

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Also, the letter of a settlement is less valid than the intentions of a settlement - when all parties involved, except one, agree on what the agreement really was, and what the intentions with the agreement was... the last party will have a hard time convinsing any court otherwise. It doesn't help that Ben afterwords bragged about having sneaked in some last minute rewording of sentences that could open up for Hyperion in the future.

Original intentions of contracts are important but evidence outside of the contract wording needs to be documented and reliable. Original information is more important than what someone remembers later which is less reliable as people forget information and have more of a reason to lie.

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All Hyperion holds, is a license to develop - they did try to pretend to own all rights, but were called out on it - licenses can rather easily be terminated, isn't that very much the point of handing out licenses instead of just fully sell the entire portefolio.

Hyperion holds much more than a license to develop AmigaOS. Read paragraph 1(b) of the 2009 settlement agreement again closely.

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Without prejudice to any Existing License Agreements listed on Exhibit 1, the Amiga Parties hereby grant Hyperion (at Hyperion's sole expense) an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide and royalty-free, transferable right and Object Code and Source Code license to the Software in order to use, develop, modify, commercialize, distribute and market the Software in any form (including through sublicensing), on any medium (now known or otherwise), through any means (including but not limited to making AmigaOS 4 available to the public via the internet) and for any current or future hardware platform.

The license can *not* easily be terminated as it requires voiding of the 2009 settlement agreement.

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9. Termination. This Agreement and the rights and obligations contained therein, shall enter into force as of the Effective Date and remain in force until such time as a court of competent jurisdiction has issued a final and non-appealable ruling on the existence of a material breach justifying termination of this Agreement.

Hyperion does *not* lawfully "own" AmigaOS but perpetually has exclusive and free use of it as long as they do not breach the 2009 settlement agreement. In practice, Hyperion owns it. The lawful owner gets no benefit (consideration) from it and can *not* easily terminate the settlement agreement.

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And... Hyperion isn't developing diddly squat - none of the developers are under contract with Hyperion, there's just an NDA and unpaid work. At best you can call them a distributor.

The 2009 settlement agreement doesn't require Hyperion to do much at all. There are only a very few things which they are required *not* to do (material breach) and most, if not all of those, were implicitly expected (you won't sue us or bad mouth us) or already required by law (respecting ownership of IP). That is why I suspect the contract lacks quid pro quo and/or Bill McEwen signed it under duress. The settlement agreement is grossly lopsided in Hyperion's favor.

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And as I have mentioned before... lots of the OS 3.1 code wasn't even copyright of CBM, but rather copyrighted by various third parties and only licensed to Commodore at the time. When was it established that all those licenses to use, and develop further, were transferable to successors of Commodore?

Hyperion has a lawyer to look into such legal matters and further dilute any stock ownership by others as he issues more stock to pay himself.