ps im aware there are copyright holders for 3.1 and they are entitled to their rights im speaking more on the insanity of it all. In particular os4 being held hostage by a holding company in belgium.
Actually, as far as Os 4 is concerned, the situation is quite clear to me. Hyperion paid for it, and had the rights to run a Os 4 development on top of Os 3.1, so it's their source and their product. So no doubts about it. And "held hostage" is not quite the right term - they own it, they sell it. Buy it - or don't.
In the same sense, Windows is "held hostage" by Microsoft. But that's only fair. They produced it, they own it, and they can do with it whatever they like. If you don't need this product, don't get it. Unfortunately, the latter part is much harder to avoid than Os 4.
For Os 3.1, however, the situation is not so obvious. I've seen what Cloanto actually bought from the bankrupt estate of CBM (yes, really), and that are the ROM images (amongst others), but not the sources. So that doesn't give them rights on the source code, IMHO, despite Cloanto claiming the contrary. I don't thrust them either. All they have are just the compiled binary images, as distributed on ROM. As soon as they would stick to selling exactly that, it would be ok, but they don't.
I haven't seen anything like that for Hyperion, i.e. I do not know what exactly they got. The license to base 4.x development on 3.1 does IMHO not cover enough rights on 3.1 as such. So maybe the compromise settlement after the process with Amiga Inc. does give them that, but to be sure, I would need to read it, which I have not.
However, it gets even more delicate: What about components CBM actually never owned? For example, ARexx? This is copyright Bill Hawes, and as far as I understand, CBM never paid for it, they likely never accquired it. Hence, if somebody is willing to update ARexx, it would probably need a license from Bill, and neither Cloanto, nor Hyperion will likely be able to give you that, neither CBM would have ever been able to.
Worse, what about the components that were generated for Os 3.9? What about those? They went partially to H&P, and partially remained at the authors. Did the authors transfer copyright to H&P? Did Hyperion transfer copyright from H&P to them? Which part of the copyright could they even transfer?
Questions over questions. I don't have clear answers, but I haven't seen the contracts either. I know too little to judge, except that I'm very definitely clear that the source code that is floating around in the internet is certainly not "Open Source" by any means, and thus completely unusable for any type of development.
The BEST thing that could EVER happen to Amiga os would be open source
Given the delicate situation, this is unlikely, and not even desirable.The Os requires a maintainer, not a bunch of hackers. Unfortunately, it is not exactly going to improve the situation by idling, as it currently happens.
