@cgutjahr

Please don't leave out Amiga Inc. and the famous...
Amiga Inc. to KMOS to (rename back to Amiga Inc.) ploy.

Those debts don't exist because we're not the same Amiga Inc.

#6

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@number6

Quote:

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

Any developer working on AmigaOS code creates a derivative work which is the ownership and within the control of the copyright owner, unless an agreement has been made. As we have seen, agreements can be contested which puts development into jeopardy.

This means that we cannot work on other entities' code base and develop it commercially as it is very unlikely we would see any financial remuneration to even cover basic costs. In addition there is the uncertainty of working on a third-party code base entangled in a legal process.

It is far more advantageous to us and our customers to work on our own projects with the freedoms and long term benefits that this provides.

Last edited by amigakit on 01-Jun-2021 at 04:39 PM.

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@amigakit

Quote:

This means that we cannot work on other entities' code base and develop it commercially as it is very unlikely we would see any financial remuneration to even cover basic costs.

Given that Amiga Corporation stated the settlement involved offering 3.2 "for free", I can see why you choose the word "unlikely". heh.

#6

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#6 Quote:

Given that Amiga Corporation stated the settlement involved offering 3.2 "for free", I can see why you choose the word "unlikely". heh.

While there is little hope of "financial remuneration" for further developing free AmigaOS components, competing against components which are free may not be very lucrative either, at least where there is development overlap and regular updates. The contingency plan logic makes some sense though, especially considering the lack of development for AmigaOS 4 and the legal mess.

@Thread

While I agree with AmigaKit’s position as theirs is the only pragmatic one that can sustain the market beyond the short term, part of me thinks against all the odds Hyperion have managed to nearly get the Classic OS back to the OS3.9 functionality while bringing even low specced OCS and ECS machines along for the ride and they did what Cloanto and AmigaKit wouldn’t. Yes, it’s legally dubious now back porting code to AmigaOS 3.2 but the code base from AmigaOS4 would have likely been lost if Amiga Inc had been custodians and we have a lot to thank them for.

For all the cr@p, Hyperion HAVE delivered! I think most people view that as a miracle and maybe even a great parting gift before Cloanto and Hyperion nuke each other to oblivion!

I think Ben should sell to A-EON as that’s the only way this can end semi-respectfully with Ben saving face too. Wishful thinking I know.

Last edited by BigD on 01-Jun-2021 at 10:57 PM.

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@BigD

Quote:

Hyperion have managed to nearly get the Classic OS back to the OS3.9 functionality while bringing even low specced OCS and ECS machines along for the ride

Huh - chipset is not relevant, CPU is. The choice to drop 68000 support back in 3.5 days was a choice done on several misconceptions and should never have happened. I have been running OS3.9 sans Reaction on low specced OCS and ECS machines for a mighty long time.

Quote:

and they did what Cloanto and AmigaKit wouldn’t.

Couldn't. Even the actual owners of Amiga did not have the sources when this circus with Hyperion started, so Hyperion had to get them elsewhere (Olsen? I don't recall.) Original plan was that Hyperion was contracted to develop OS4, and once it was done, return sources etc to Amiga. Well, this never happened, and sources remained hostage at Hyperion.

Quote:

Yes, it’s legally dubious now back porting code to AmigaOS 3.2 but the code base from AmigaOS4 would have likely been lost if Amiga Inc had been custodians and we have a lot to thank them for.

Many would also argue that it is also technically dubious to backport code from OS4 to OS3. Personally I find it extremely annoying to see more and more OS4 crap landing on my favourite recreational platform.

Quote:

I think Ben should sell to A-EON as that’s the only way this can end semi-respectfully with Ben saving face too. Wishful thinking I know.

Cloanto will win, will be legally get access, and will hopefully see the value in open sourcing as much as possible, so anyone can cherrypick features and options from our own personal taste and hardware.

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@geen_naam

Open source would work just fine - Mike Battalina has already talked about that possibility.

It would work just fine - anyone can do what they like. If people want the "official" release they buy it from Amiga Inc. The developers already seem happy to work for free. Amiga Inc. would appoint a steward that decides what makes it to release. That doesn't stop anyone else making their own non-standard release.

Remember Hyperion is not a software company, it's a lawyer. That company makes money by stealing rights then charging itself legal fees to represent itself. It's not a business, it's a scam.

@thread

The focus of all parties is resolution, so I suggest discussing the future is a bit premature.

However, there is nothing wrong with thinking ahead, and this location might be more on-topic:

A Discourse on Possible Amiga Futures

Spawned from this: http://cloanto.org/

#6

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@geen_naam

Quote:

To control an OS needs leadership. Someone saying:" That distribution is allowed to call themselves the official distribution" is no leadership.

I think fairly paying to acquire and owning the rights to the software gives Cloanto that right.

I think that Hyperion's theft of Classic Amiga OS, regardless of whatever shiny new toys it allows is plain wrong, immoral and abhorrent.

All the fanboys/girls/whatevers that keep sending Benny the Lawyer money for something he has no right to shows how selfish the community in general is.

I can't believe how so many people think it's okay with what Hermans has got away with so far. In any case he'll lose, and if for some unlikely reason he weasles through a legal loophole, then Amiga Inc. can just open source and make it all moot. Noone will feel the need to pay the lawyer then.

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

@dalek

They pay for a product they want and will use and to support the efforts of the developers to who feel the reward of seeing the sales figures if not money on their pocket.

It is surely more of an issue that Hyperion agreed with Cloanto that AmigaOS 3.2 should be a free update then they broke the agreement! That sort of stuff won’t go down very well in court!

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@geen_naam

Quote:

But I hope that OS4.1 will end up in the hands of people that actually care. Trevor for example.

It is my understanding that Trevor is a shareholder or has a stake in Hyperion so he should be given preference if he wants to buy it IMHO.

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@geen_naam

Quote:

see what this new judge will rule.

It's deja vu for him really. Same man, although there was a mediator involved as well, with the prior case.

The only obvious change is that he became head judge in the intervening time.

Given the complicated nature of the case, the transfer to Judge Marinez was seen as a plus, given prior familiarity.

#6

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@geen_naam

Quote:

At least in linux there's an official team who controls the kernel. How did you envision this for an open source amiga world?

How did we get from "Leaman is trying to make his own AmigaOS" to "open source is bad, people could fork!" in just one or two postings?

The party that controls the trademark would be the one that gets all the attention. In a perfect world, they would also act less stupid than their predecessors: Communicate your goals clearly, attract a few key developers - any forks somebody might create will not matter much.

Quote:

There are a lot of people who think that things should have been implemented differenty. When they get access to the source, this will actually happen too.

First of all: so what? It already happens - just ask Mr. Amigakit.

Also, the number of qualified developers is quite small. A few bedroom hackers might be tempted to "optimize" stuff, but preparing an entire release requires a lot work. And you can't call it "Amiga" or "Workbench", so nobody will care anyway.

Quote:

That an open source amigaos could suddenly attract large numbers of professional coders is nothing more than a fairy tale

Which is why nobody ever claimed it would do that.

Open sourcing AmigaOS would be about stopping shady entities from keeping it hostage, about ending the stupid games with copyright assignments or 'NDA's, about making sure a developers knows that whatever happens to the publisher his work will not end up locked in a safe somewhere.

And it would force whoever is in charge to actually act sensible - instead of just relying on legal threats to people, or the fact that he once had a beer with the guy who registered amiga.org in 1994,.

Quote:

So no. An open source amigaos sounds like a horror scenario to me. But it would be nice that the closed source would be in the hands of a company that is actualy willing and able to move the platform forwards.

Literally anything would be better than the status quo. Not sure which events from the last three decades make you think a company "willing and able to move the platform forward" is going to show up.

@cgutjahr

Quote:

Literally anything would be better than the status quo. Not sure which events from the last three decades make you think a company "willing and able to move the platform forward" is going to show up.

Agreed. Amiga source code in the hands of another small company is just another 10 years of false hope.

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@geen_naam

Quote:

For AmigaOS, everybody wants to be in charge and no-one is accepted as captain.

That's simply not true - the 3.2 team has managed to come up with what looks like a very respectable release - with zero input from Hyperion or anybody else. Everything they do suggests to me there's a functioning team at work here.

It's true that there's no shortage of wannabe dictators in this market. There's two reasons for that: lack of actual leadership for more than three decades - and greed. The first one will always be a problem - for some reason, nobody wants to listen to Captain Gutjahr.

But open sourcing AmigaOS might actually address the second problem: it sends a very clear message to all the "developers need be paid" and "professional investors" and "let's be as secretive as possible" wannabe-managers that actually created this whole mess. Open sourcing AmigaOS is the equivalent of saying (amongst other things): "Let's take a step back, look at this from a technical perspective and have a honest and open conversation about what could or should be next".

Quote:

You made it clear several times that this is your opinion. But that doesn't make it true.

No, it's not my opinion. Here's what Matt posted in this very thread:

"As we have seen, agreements can be contested which puts development into jeopardy. This means that we cannot work on other entities' code base and develop it commercially as it is very unlikely we would see any financial remuneration to even cover basic costs."

Him not going to work on "other entities' code base" doesn't leave much room for speculation.

Quote:

This situation is totally different when everybody start to write their own version of amigaos4

That's the point: There will always be only one version of AmigaOS, because only one party can call its product "Amiga" OS (or at least not more parties than now). If you want to know how much difference that makes, ask the MorphOS team, who got mostly ignored ever since Bill Buck stopped handing out free Pegasos computers. Or the AROS crowd.

Quote:

There was no consenses about Hyperion as leader. There is no consensus about Aeon as leader.

You must live in a different reality than me. There always is consensus about who's the leader - until they #### up really, really bad. For about a decade or so. Then, maybe, some people will start to express their concern by no longer adding dancing bananas to everything they post here.

Quote:

But do you think that we would be here today if Aeon wasn't actually funding that development?

Define "here"? We still can't play HD video unless we sacrifice a lamb first, we still have a graphics subsystem from the stoneage despite plans being made a decade and a half ago to fix that - and instead of an open industry standard, we are using a proprietary solution for our 3D API. Plus, anybody who wants to use uptodate drivers is forced to finance Amigakit's wannabe OS replacement.

The fact that we still have experienced and motivated people like Hans (and maybe a dozen more devs) and abuse them like that - or worse, prevent them from contributing at all, for some extremely stupid reason - should anger you more than it angers me.

@geen_naam

Just another quick note.

We have a business here "Amikit". Jan prolly wonders how he got dragged into this discussion. heh.

Perhaps for clarity we should stop using Amigakit, Amikit, A-eon, etc. interchangeably?
Not to mention the references to A-eonkit...

I'm not going to call Amiga Inc. "leader", but historically Hyperion and Eyetech were the Amigaone Partners and Amiga Inc. was tasked as the management arm of the triad.
At that point there was at least a hope of management equating to leadership.

#6

Last edited by number6 on 02-Jun-2021 at 07:40 PM.

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@cgutjahr

Quote:

Define "here"? We still can't play HD video unless we sacrifice a lamb first,

HD Video works perfectly fine since the Video Acceleration Library was introduced in the Enhancer Software. The retail price of the Enhancer Software is hardly akin to sacraficing a lamb.

Quote:

we still have a graphics subsystem from the stoneage despite plans being made a decade and a half ago to fix that -

The graphics library from AmigaOS is a 1980s design and I agree with you that it is archaic. Hans has worked around this.

Quote:

and instead of an open industry standard, we are using a proprietary solution for our 3D API. Plus, anybody who wants to use uptodate drivers is forced to finance Amigakit's wannabe OS replacement.

Clearly you do not understand the costs and scope of development.

Your assertions are not factually correct: 100 percent of the revenues of the Enhancer Software goes to finance the 2D/3D graphics sub systems and drivers. AK-Datatypes, system commands and some gadgets have been contributed to the Enhancer Software by AmigaKit Ltd at no cost. The other items are funded by A-EON using other revenues. It would be a mistake to think that significant graphics development in this small market would be fully funded by the ticket price Enhancer Software. Why do you think other parties have not funded this development instead ? A hint: six figure costs may have something to do with it...

Quote:

The fact that we still have experienced and motivated people like Hans

Why do you think Hans is motivated and focussed on a development plan?

Hans has been a beneficiary of everyone that pays for an Enhancer Software licence. This is no doubt a major factor motivating him to further improve the graphics system. Without this commercial model it is likely that some developers who work on the Enhancer Software would leave.

[quote[ (and maybe a dozen more devs) and abuse them like that - or worse, prevent them from contributing at all, for some extremely stupid reason - should anger you more than it angers me.[/quote]

None of our developers are being "abused": they receive remuneration and are free to contribute if they so wish. We don't expect any free lunches.

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@number6

Quote:

I'm not going to call Amiga Inc. "leader", but historically Hyperion and Eyetech were the Amigaone Partners and Amiga Inc. was tasked as the management arm of the triad. At that point there was at least a hope of management equating to leadership.

Amiga Inc should not be used in the same sentence as ‘leadership’. They went about spending Pentti Kouri’s investment and the only thing of note produced from them was a Christmas Card maker! They were a joke and deserved to lose control of AmigaOS IMHO. They couldn’t even secure the Workbench 3.1 sources for Hyperion to work from! They did manage to commission some lovely Amiga branded mugs though!

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@BigD

When they talk about Amiga Inc, they tend to forget about coupon scam, T- Shirts that was never delivered.

Amiga Inc was no angles.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 02-Jun-2021 at 10:08 PM.

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geen_naam Quote:

You completely misunderstood. Linux is open source and it is very clear who has been calling the shots from the very beginning until today. The companies behind the distributions also recognize the captain of the ship. (Linus) For AmigaOS, everybody wants to be in charge and no-one is accepted as captain. So the open source ship will never leave the harbour. That's my point.

The owner of the AmigaOS ship is now Michele Battilana even if the pirate Ben Hermans has tried to steal the ship after it was loaned to him by the previous owner. The owner of the ship is allowed to appoint (hire) the captain. It would be a good idea to discuss how the ship might make money before setting sail though. It will likely require investment to prepare and outfit the ship prior to the voyage. Investors should get some say in their investment.

geen_naam Quote:

You made it clear several times that this is your opinion. But that doesn't make it true. Reimplementing those commands seems odd and useless. But at least it's a copy in functionality. "Mr Amikit" Didn't decide that the copy command should erase your harddrive because he knows better than others. A 24bit color clock seems to be a waste of effort as well. Yes, there's a new multiview. But are you trying to argue that Notepad++ shouldn't exist as a third party prog because there's already Notepad? All the other components are extensions. But "Mr. Amikit" is not in control of the OS. So running those extensions is an option, not a fork of OS4. This situation is totally different when everybody start to write their own version of amigaos4. Imagine the mess on os4depot when certain programs and libraries only work on certain distributions or even processor architectures. See MorphOS vs AmigaOS as an extreme example.

AmiKit is a 68k Amiga distribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmiKit

The AmigaKit Enhancer Software is fine until new functionality is added to AmigaOS modules with the same name. Hyperion may enhance the modules in a different way in the future causing incompatibility as only a minimum library number is asked for but the two modules may have different functionality. This has the disadvantages of a fork. AmigaOS 3.2 could be thought of as a fork of AmigaOS 4 too. Even though the API is becoming closer, they will likely not converge completely. This means some modules will be incompatible (at the source level) with a disadvantage similar to a fork. Porting AmigaOS 4 to another architecture like ARM and making it a proper NG desktop OS would also mean a different API with a similar disadvantage to forking. At least MorphOS called their OS something other than AmigaOS although they made the same mistake of not updating the AmigaOS API for modern desktop features from the start. It is easier and cheaper to develop for a single architecture and standard hardware than multiple architectures and a wide range of hardware. Expanding AmigaOS development to more architectures and adding modern desktop features are a dream of many Amiga fans but this is really difficult and likely not profitable anyway. There aren't very many profitable OSs, especially on the desktop.

geen_naam Quote:

Open sourcing will be the final nail to the coffin. The os will be at drift. There was no consensus about Hyperion as leader. There is no consensus about Aeon as leader. There will be no consensus about Cloanto as leader. The funny thing is that one of the most likely distributions will come from "Mr Amikit" anyways. Because he has proven with enhancer that he's willing to invest. Exactly the one that you critisize so much. Let's call it karma if it happens. That you don't agree with what either Hyperion or "Mr Amikit" are doing is exactly why I'm talking about all those captains who know it all better. And why it will become one big mess.

I would like to see the AmigaOS source open but with a license which discourages forks. I believe this is possible as that is the way the vbcc compiler is. I would not have helped develop that project if the source was not open and I believe this is true for others too. You have complained about lack of documentation for AmigaOS drivers in another thread and how the existing ones were behind a NDA wall. I don't believe open sourcing the Amiga would mean chaos (even though the Amiga evolved from CaOS which ironically had resource tracking). It would be helpful if a management and standards committee was created for a more open AmigaOS.

geen_naam Quote:

I know that you have a blind spot for what Aeon has actually been doing for AmigaOS4. But the biggest improvements in the past decades came from them. They have proven to invest literaly a million+ without return of investment. They have given us faster hardware and better gfx. You have respect for HDR and that's good. But do you think that we would be here today if Aeon wasn't actually funding that development? But Captain Gutjahr (the C cannot be a coincidence ) has a different opinion and would have done things differently. Like all those captains waiting for the os4 source.

Trevor Dickinson has likely been investing in the Amiga with the hope to turn it around, make it profitable and proliferate the Amiga. That is what investors try to do instead of looking for a tax deduction which is just a consequence of the failures. While his efforts should be appreciated for the benefits to Amiga users, I doubt they have been successful and likely can't continue indefinitely. It is very difficult for niche market computer hardware manufacturers to survive. Economies of scale are too important for computer hardware.

geen_naam Quote:

Even the suggestion that some big company will show up is false hope either. Trusting that all different camps and captains will suddenly agree to work together in the open source scenario is false hope too. So you're suggesting that there's no hope at all. I put my faith in those who are actually doing something at the moment.

In my opinion, there is not much value in the AmigaOS by itself and especially on the desktop because it can't be sold for much and isn't competitive. There is value is in the Amiga brand, the Amiga community (users and developers), the AmigaOS embedded in products and in Amiga 68k games for the retro (toy) market. There may be value in the embedded market for very small footprint systems.

The Amiga businesses will likely continue stepping on each others feet as separate businesses like they are doing now. They would be better off pooling their resources and working together. If the Amiga brand is put back together, the cooperators should consider a merger as "Amiga Corporation" along with allowing others investors to buy stock. They do need to decide where the ship will sail and the route to get to there.