[ethanpil]

Anyone interested in a comprehensive summary of the Amiga legal spaghetti should take a look at https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/

Play by play updates on their Twitter at https://mobile.twitter.com/amigadocuments

[snvzz]

And, by extension, I'd suggest not fueling the legal drama by funding the lawyers through buying Hyperion's 3.2 or Cloanto's products.

[chipotle_coyote]

So…who exactly do you buy from, then?

That's a semi-serious question; the "Amiga Documents" site linked in the post you're replying to seems to cast Hyperion as the (relative?) villains and Cloanto as the (relative?) good guys, but it seems if you want a version of AmigaOS released this century, that means Hyperion.

[snvzz]

>So…who exactly do you buy from, then?

Nobody.

>Seems to cast Hyperion as the (relative?) villains and Cloanto as the (relative?) good guys

They're both spending all their cash fighting each other. I support neither.

>but it seems if you want a version of AmigaOS released this century, that means Hyperion.

Support AROS. Copy AmigaOS, don't support it. That is the conclusion I arrived to.

This is one way of many possible: https://www.power2people.org/projects/overview/

[takeda]

After skimming through it I have mixed feelings. On one hand I wanted to purchase it. I no longer have a real Amiga, but could use it on UAE.

But from that summary Hyperion Entertainment does not look that great and seems like it's the reason why AmigaOS did not became open source.

[kstrauser]

Is there a summary of the summary?

Also, is there any financial value left in that IP? From an outside perspective it looks like people fighting over table scraps.

[kmeisthax]

tl;dr: The Amiga was created by a company Commodore bought, then Commodore ran itself into the ground, ESCOM bought up the corpse, then ran themselves into the ground, Gateway bought up ESCOM and sold/spun off the Amiga assets into Amiga Inc, Amiga Inc licensed their OS to Hyperion. Meanwhile Cloanto has been working on AmigaOS since 1993 and Amiga Inc also licensed their OS to Cloanto. Hyperion spends more of it's time shipping litigation rather than software.

The financial value of the AmigaOS is nil. Zero. Nothing. At best you could maybe sell copies to enthusiasts, but even tens of thousands of sales wouldn't be enough to hire even a single full-time developer unless you priced it way too high. This would be a poster child for relicensing as Free Software if it weren't for the fact that the OS was tied up in litigation and license double-dealing.

TBH, is the way pretty much all proprietary software dies. Companies holding onto their software through bankruptcy are legally obligated to sell it to whoever will recoup the most money for creditors; but usually their software is already outdated or unusable. So it will almost always get sold to sketchy companies or wind up sitting in some bank's junk assets portfolio for the end of time. Even if that wasn't the case, most proprietary software is actually very much not legally Freeable, because it has other non-Free dependencies. Occasionally, you get an outright miracle like Blender, where the whole app is owned by one bankrupt company and you can crowdsource enough capital to pay off creditors.

(Examples of other abandoned software whose owners' hands are tied would include things like Adobe Flash Player or IBM OS/2.)

[renaudg]

> Hyperion spends more of it's time shipping litigation rather than software.

That's a weird comment to make on the day Hyperion ships a second significant update to AmigaOS in 3 years, while Cloanto has been sitting on its IP to sell a glorified, Windows-only UAE bundle with no improvements whatsoever.

I don't have an opinion on the legal fight, but as user I can see who's actually moving things forward, and that's where I'm putting my money.

[takeda]

I don't know. At right now the AmigaOS IP is pretty much worthless and only people interested in it are fans that are driven by nostalgia.

Cloanto was trying to open source it (which is probably the best thing for such base) but Hyperion blocked that effort.

Hyperion also doesn't hire any developers.