@Thread

I remember seeing A-EON, Ben, Trevor, Matthew, the Friedens and Varysis at the Bletchley Park X1000 launch but the picture above best demonstrates what 'Amiga community' reflected in Amiga leadership COULD look like. Ben isn't in that group anymore and he could have been.

It will be his loss in the long run. You don't profit off the passion and good will of Amiga coders and customers for as long as he has and not pay the price in the end. Timothy de Groote, Evert Carton, Costel Mincea all seem to have fallen out with Ben as have Steve Solie and the Friedens. How many more bridges does he have to burn?

@Hyperion-Director
(corrected)

Ben, please settle outside of court and/or sell Hyperion to A-EON and go live your life as a lawyer! Compared to you even Petro Tyschtschenko has a happy welcome at most Amiga meets awaiting him (just keep David Pleasance away from him ). We appreciate you allowing the ongoing development of AmigaOS NG and Classic but don't drag the Amiga down with your own fortunes PLEASE!!

Last edited by BigD on 30-May-2021 at 09:21 AM.

_________________
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@BigD

Just a reminder that there is no such account as Hyperionmp connected to anyone here nor any managing partners.

just Hyperion-Director now

#6

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@BigD
"... Ben, please settle outside of court and/or sell Hyperion to A-EON and ..."

Why would selling to A-EON be a good thing ? Sorry maybe I'm being unfair given Trevors dedication to the platform and I recognize that he seems to be a nice guy and all ... But, A-Eon's decisions in the past were pretty bad, to use a less harsh term, the resources they've spent devoloping the X5000 and A1222 (still apparently to this day...) are a complete was of time, money and developers efforts. Instead they should have concentrated on porting AmigaOS to one of the various Power based boards that are the same and some even less price of the X5000 (and previous X1000).
They could've also ported it to PPC based Macs like MorphOS did and the OS would be more advanced nowadays..

So what makes you think they'll make good decisions on the future ?

I have much worse opinion of Cloanto, their work for advancing the platform is nothing if you ask me, they could've developed PPaint much more for example. Apart from profiting from emulation and a few utilities here and there, there doesn't seem to be anything significant. They're better than AInc I guess :)

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José

I feel like all chances of settlement are now lost given Hermans reneging on what seemed like a pretty good deal for his theft.

I can't see Cloanto agreeing to any further settlement talks. Why would they? Seems like Hermans was just stalling hoping Cloanto would run out of money. Such a bully move.

It seems from the court documents that everything is going in their favor and Hermans is cutting off his nose to spite his face. Looks like he will be the one running out of money after all. Now that he has noone willing to represent him.

@dalek

There's only one path for @Hyperion-Director now.

- His US lawyer won't represent him and the court isn't accepting him representing himself
- His former business partner is going to testify against him that Ben's interpretation of the settlement agreement is not what the intent was
- His Proxy-Director vehicle Ben Hermans BV is reportedly in administration due to paying himself cash advances and not paying the tax on it https://twitter.com/amigadocuments/status/1397945765935394819

If he does not pay the taxes he owes, or cannot, he will be declared bankrupt. Then he won't be able to either practice as a lawyer or as a company director. He'll have to sell Hyperion's assets, what little there are, for whatever he can get, to pay his tax bill. If he's smart he'll do that before someone issues a winding up order against Hyperion itself and it too enters administration and the scraps sold by the administrators. it seems likely too that if Hyperion is wound up, the settlement agreement becomes null and void and everything reverts to Amiga Inc without them having to pay a penny for it.

Last edited by Mobileconnect on 30-May-2021 at 07:42 AM.

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@Jose

Quote:

Why would selling to A-EON be a good thing ?

Because they ARE actually paying people to work on AmigaOS 4.x through the Enhancer program. They are to all intensive purposes the only ones now pushing AmigaOS 4.x forwards!

_________________
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John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@Mobileconnect

Quote:

it seems likely too that if Hyperion is wound up, the settlement agreement becomes null and void and everything reverts to Amiga Inc without them having to pay a penny for it.

All the more reason to withhold buying AmigaOS 3.2 so that this all gets sorted sooner rather than later. It’s just a shame that that risks not being able to buy it following a bankruptcy/injunction etc

_________________
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John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Quote:

Because they ARE actually paying people to work on AmigaOS 4.x through the Enhancer program.

The "Enhancer" program is one of the dumbest ideas ever and nothing but an attempt to have a power grab financed by end users.

And "paying people" is a stupid concept anyway - until you actually established a market.

@cgutjahr

Quote:

cgutjahr wrote: @BigD Quote: Because they ARE actually paying people to work on AmigaOS 4.x through the Enhancer program. ...And "paying people" is a stupid concept anyway - until you actually established a market.

No, paying people for their time and expertise is a mandatory part of our capitalist system! Whether there is a market or not is a problem for Cloanto or A-EON and not the coders! The coders still need to get paid.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Quote:

Quote: cgutjahr wrote: ...And "paying people" is a stupid concept anyway - until you actually established a market. No, paying people for their time and expertise is a mandatory part of our capitalist system! Whether there is a market or not is a problem for Cloanto or A-EON and not the coders! The coders still need to get paid.

Notice the quotation marks - what cgutjahr is saying is that coders aren't really paid, it is more like beer money.

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@kolla

Quote:

Notice the quotation marks - what cgutjahr is saying is that coders aren't really paid, it is more like beer money.

If they agree to payment with beer or 'hobby time rates' that's fine but asking them to work for free while the powers that be save the profits for an IP litigation case is NOT ok IMHO.

My point was that if there is no market and the coders are paid then quite quickly Hyperion or A-EON or Cloanto would stop releasing the products as it would bleed money! 'Pay' the coders, trust the market and "Keep the Party Going!" if the market sustains it. If not tweak the formula PLEASE IP/license holders!

Last edited by BigD on 01-Jun-2021 at 10:02 AM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@kolla

Some work that the Amiga Developer Team undertakes is classed in the "beer money" category but a lot of the larger projects are certainly not.


@cgutjahr

The ongoing development of the Enhancer Software has come about through necessity over the last 6 years.

At the time new hardware such as the X1000 (and later X5000) were manufactured with PCI Express. There were no compatible Radeon drivers for the graphics cards which were available brand new on the shelves. You cant really buy a complete new built to order system with second hand PCI graphics card installed. There was no obvious plan communicated of how OS4 was going to have modern graphics drivers. Something had to be done fast to cater for the hardware.

OS4's native graphics system is very primitive with a few old graphic drivers such as Voodoo. MiniGL is a remnant from the late 1990s.

Understandably there was much discussion about modern 3D shader support in OS4.1. More recently Power Management API, Sensor API, Video Acceleration were all requested.

These are problems that the Enhancer Software solves at great costs (six figure sums).

It will continue to grow and expand to new complexity as users demands dictate.

Content created for the Enhancer Software is free of the legal wranglings. A-EON does not develop under licence - it owns it's software IP. Consequently it is free to develop regardless of third-party disputes. When you have the stability of owning your own IP, you can release when you want and add the functionality you want. Why build your house upon sand? Especially as A-EON was not a stakeholder in the OS4 project or had no creative input into it's direction and development.

Our independent developers work hard to create a sustainable platform that can benefit the customers who have invested in the X1000, X5000 and A1222 Plus. We also work closely together with ACube to support the Sam 460ex.

Last edited by amigakit on 01-Jun-2021 at 11:44 AM.
Last edited by amigakit on 01-Jun-2021 at 11:42 AM.

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@amigakit

Thank you for sharing this information Matthew. As a Amiga X5000 owner and developer this helps bring some clarity and piece of mind.

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@amigakit

Quote:

Content created for the Enhancer Software is free of the legal wranglings.

But surely affected -by- it.

Would you not have followed through your plans for enhancer for AmigaOS3.x if not for the strategic moves made through Hyperion's issue of 3.1 update, 3.1.4, and now 3.2?

Would you have been as inclined to make all the domain and trademark moves, without these wranglings?

#6

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@geen_naam

+1

totally agree with that

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@number6

The Classic software development continues with the code base being shared with the Next Generation software as much as possible.

It will be released but it is a lot of work writing content from scratch. The benefit will be forthcoming in providing an independent platform.

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@geen_naam

Sure, I understand, If it helps we have separate developers mostly for Classic and NG. Most of them would prefer to work on one platform and not the other.

However there is some crossover, for example with the talents of our datatypes library developer. He has written both the sound datatype and datatypes library from scratch for both 68K and PPC. He has also written the Sound Prefs and AK-ILBM datatype. We also have another talented developer who has written the commands for us which co-exist on both 68K and PPC. These have been recently released on Updater.

We are always eager for new developers to reduce the development time.

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@amigakit

Quote:

We are always eager for new developers to reduce the development time.

Extremely similar statements made repeatedly by the 3.2 team btw.

In other words you have a niche within a niche here and different 3.x teams competing to attract developers.

#6

Last edited by number6 on 01-Jun-2021 at 02:00 PM.

_________________
This posting, in its entirety, represents solely the perspective of the author.
*Secrecy has served us so well*

@BigD

Quote:

No, paying people for their time and expertise is a mandatory part of our capitalist system!

Our "capitalist system" relies on the mechanics of supply and demand.

There is less than zero demand for most stuff in the Enhancer package - nobody needs new JPEG and PNG datatypes or CLI commands. The diehards at os4welt.de are trying to come up with their own install scripts now, so they can only install the useful stuff from Enhancer (read: the drivers).

Quote:

The coders still need to get paid.

That's what entities like Amigakit or Hyperion keep telling you. The truth is, most coders who worked on AmigaOS (let alone MorphOS or AROS) haven't been paid in a decade and a half.

I certainly don't mind people like Hans or Andy getting some money out of this. But before you throw more money at the problem, maybe you should check how well throwing money at the problem has worked in the past?

@geen_naam

Quote:

My view on enhancer is to take aos4 further then Hyperion is able to.

Just to be clear: I feel nothing but respect for Hans' work. And obviously Hyperion hasn't moved os4 forward much in the last decade.

But Enhancer bundles replacements for standard shell commands, new Datatypes, a multiview replacement, a text editor and things like that. This is not about "taking aos4 further", it's about replacing OS4 - and Matt communicates that quite openly. I have a problem with *that*. Especially since Matt is well aware that AmigakitOS won't sell, so we can all look forward to more trademark drama.

Last edited by cgutjahr on 01-Jun-2021 at 02:08 PM.