Consequences of the AmigaOS 3.1 source code "leak", one year after?

[Pat the Cat]

I ask again - with binaries floating around that were built using the leaked sources - why are the legal owners not doing anything?

Read the settlement. That just states Amiga Group have the right to enforce copyright.

Whether they choose to do so, or are able to do, is a different question. And whether their claim to do is legitimate technically hasn't been tested in a court (yet). That would be the "bottom line", I guess.

[Pat the Cat]

Exactly. I don't know why AROS is considered to be a "NG" AmigaOS when it is just a clone of OS3.1. OS3.5 and OS3.9 have been out for about 17 years now. Still waiting for them to be supported by AROS.

Just my opinion, but... I can see no advantage in moving up. I mean, I want to run Amiga software. That means, something written for a machine with a 3.1 ROM. Or earlier.

How many full size applications are there specifically for 3.5 or later? Erm... not enough.

[Pat the Cat]

Print off the 3.1 source code into a physical document. Give it a title, and call it literature.
Then send it to China and have the title translated into Mandarin, get them to code it again.

The Chinese have a compiler for turning pure Mandarin into executable computer code?

Wow! That's some technology! :roflmao:

It's also kind of ironic, because the Chinese got quite a few technology breaks in the late 70s - from the British.

Apparently Mrs T sent over a team of volunteer IT academics to give them some boosters on chip manufacturing and similar "high tech" processes, as part of the Hong Kong settlement negotiations. They didn't arrive in one block - it was a trickle.

I met one of them a couple of years back. He was looking for somewhere to store or operate two container loads of manufacturing robots that he'd acquired in the decades he was there. The Chinese were no longer interested in such retro, backwards technology, as their own designs were far superior.

[Pat the Cat]

What the title of a literary work?  Perhaps have another read of what I wrote. Maybe I need to translate it for you.

Maybe your English teacher should have told you, that when using the word "it", the convention is that it refers to the last noun OR the first usage of the word "it" in a sentence. The first "it" in that sentence was referring to a noun you had used earlier, "source code".

Or maybe they did tell you, and you ignored them,

[Pat the Cat]

...  I would absolutely love to be able to buy AROS ROMs and replace kickstart and have a modern version of AmigaOS running on my A4000D, but I don't think it's possible currently, since it would most likely break some compatibility.

Hmmm... apparently, you can actually take .device files from a further release (designed for the same processor and similar hardware, mind you) and run it on an earlier system.

Not guaranteed, but it does generally work. You want big drive partitions (non boot) on 3.1?

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=71766&page=2

[Pat the Cat]

@PtC

Would you say you're totally full of sh!t or just partially? :rolleyes:

Any human being that says they have none of that in them is either lying, or a truly gifted newborn baby.

SO, are you partially full of it? And if you say no and you ain't lying, I've been trying to get hardware working for the past 45 years or so. That's a lot more experience than a truly gifted newborn baby has.

When did you start? And have you actually tried using .device drivers from a release further than the one you have?

Of couse, you are free to ignore my questions. Ignorant people often use such a method. To ignore is to be ignorant.

[Pat the Cat]

Oh, I was well aware of being able to do that, my point was I would rather run an open source operating system that can continually be supported by a community over copying out updated libraries/device files that may or may not get continued support.

So do I. It's called Linux. The reason I'm interested still in the Amiga is because I've got some old code to throw in the melting point that might just help people if they want to try VJing.

AmigaDOS isn't open source, which is a voluntary sharing by the originator. Anyway, I was talking about using NEWer .device files on older systems. Not older .device files on NEWer systems.

The only way I know of to get GUARANTEED CONTINUED SUPPORT - is to wear a sports bra. Forget it for technology, it's a myth.

Bad move on not admitting you were at least PARTIALLY full of the brown stuff. Unless you are an AI. Met a few of them online.

[Pat the Cat]

So what do you call sources that are floating around on internet for anyone to download, and for which the ownership is unclear, and for which the acclaimed owners do not take any legal action for whatever reason?

Such are referred to as leaked documents. Not open source. Just because something is IN the Public Domain does not make it Open Source. Open source has been voluntarily forwarded and made available to the end user for examination. There was no such voluntary disclosure.

As to "what are they doing about it", legal action does include communication of many sorts, and the moderator Eliyahu has received some. Legal action does not start in a court, but it is such places that do reach outcomes of legal action. Eventually.

Now you might call it bogus, or whatever, but it's not your balls on the line, and it's not your .org exclusively on the the line either. I have answered your questions and given input as clearly as I can, trying to be factual and unprejudiced on a whole set of awkward issues. Trying to see both sides of the argument and explore possible alternatives.

[Pat the Cat]

Okay, no one has really come out and said it... but.. does it actually compile?

I seem to recall when it was leaked that people were having a hard time getting it to compile  anything, and that sources were missing.  But then it was long enough ago that I could be remembering something else.

Can you compile it with gcc?

How can anyone say "Yes" without making it blatantly obvious that they have tried to do so?

Bear in mind, it isn't designed to produce directly executable code exactly like other programs. It's designed to run from a ROM chip, at startup.

Also, I really don't know which compiler it was designed for. Probably Lattice, but that is a guess.

[Pat the Cat]

Clearly someone managed to compile parts of it at least, the parts that you can find in BB3+4, the parts with major version string ... 42

To build the whole thing is not what people are interested in either, each person has his/her point of "itch" that has been bothering them.

Kolla, I haven't ever looked at the source code of an operating system written in C. C isn't one of my primary coding languages. I can adjust a C program's data, stuff like getting an Arduino system running. That isn't the same as an operating system.

Both the leaked 3.0 (?) and 4 partially or completely rewritten in C, but certain parts of the leaked source must be derived from the BCPL ancestor, TripOS, that was ported to the Amiga. And really, no one has ever attempted a full translation of AmigaDOS, into hand coded assembler. For any kind of Amiga hardware. At least that I'm aware of.

Bits of the operating system can be coded in assembler, and ideally, an OS evolves tailored to the hardware available.

It's amazing how like AmigaDOS TripOS is. Because TriPOS is still in use, networked distros that cost money, by a lot of British insurance companies.

Here's a very short overview, with regard to similarities like drivers and libraries. Parts of the leak might well date from a much earlier BCPL ancestor. That isn't true of AmigaOS V4 and later. That's all been redone, which is probably partly WHY V4+ is so greedy on 68K machines for resources.

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

Anyway, I haven't looked at the code. Lattice is mentioned in a lot of publicly available Commodore works, and I bought a few, so it's reasonable to assume that was the dev tool used to put the leak together in the first place, V3.0 was a CBM software and firmware release. Isn't that right? I don't know.

Unless, perhaps, it isn't genuine in all respects. That's one possibility, with an internet dissemated file.

[Pat the Cat]

The development path of AmigaOs is somewhat convoluted.

AmigaOs is already hard to maintain as of today. Translating it into  assembler makes it even harder to maintain, and harder to upgrade. Not a  good deal if you ask me. Assembler code might be quick, streamlined  efficient, but also bug-ridden, and "not yet quite ready, sorry."

Well yes, translating all of the code into assembler will take quite  some time. But, key components can be translated one at a time and  tested for compatility. I take your point about exec, the only part you  can't really mess with a lot without breaking something somewhere is  exec and intuition. That has to be present at the turnkey stage, ie,  burnt into a ROM, or sideways ROM mapped in a 32 bit Amiga.

Lattice C 5 came from Lattice, not CBM. The SAS institute bought it later on and released version 6 as SAS/C.

Didn't know that, like I said, C isn't my thing. Yeah, I recall  arp.library being a seperate component. I guess the whole history is  different exec's and family sets of Workbench and KS resources being  used, some shunted in, some shunted out.

I just find it fascinating that you can recode bits of it and shunt  different versions of libraries and devices into and out of a system by  copying files and reboot. With differing levels of success for getting  things working, it would seem. Or load a different module device or  library to replace the one started with from the KS ROM.

Oh yeah, Thomas, respect for looking at the 68040 library. I played with  one once, reviewed it as a current draining, hot beast, but I didn't  click that the 68040.llibrary was eating memory as it ran. I put it down  to hardware issues, not a software problem in the 68040.library. Then  again, I only had it a couple days. Not like I really had much time to  check. Respect for sorting that issue out.

EDIT:  I think I get the point about dos.library really calling the tunes as  far as smartly using the right library without the end user being aware of it. But, it seems to me that rather  than the program choosing the library for WB2 and later, it's more a  case of the programmer chooses roughly what will be used, and the end  user has to find and slot in the best fit of device and library and maybe handler for their system and  application, if the one they are using doesn't do the job properly. That was always true, very few people ever bothered with loadseg. I didnt. I haven't looked at Ralph Babels book, seems he is upset at an early public release in English so just sticks with the German for the current release. Ignorant? Well, I'm a bit busy right now, will try to catch up later on an 800 page technical document written in German.

[Pat the Cat]

Er... ok?



I don't understand - why are you talking about OS4?
(And why do you write so much that is not at all relevant here?!)

Maybe you do not know the AmigaOS version string conventions? OS 3.0 was largely "version 39", as in most binaries in OS 3.0 had major version 39. In OS 3.1, these were bumped to 40 and maybe a few 41. In the OS 3.1 leaked sources, there are a few things that have developed further, to version 42.

This has _nothing_ to do with OS4.

Well, if you checked the TripOS link, you would have noted that it lists Amiga V4 as being totally written in C, and earlier versions as being only partially written in C to a certain extent, but not much reference to which libraries and devices are optimized for a given class of Amiga hardware, and also which bits of pre V4 are just slightly altered BCPL to compile on a C compiler. I would guess, not many.

As for the leaked source being 3.1, I didn't know that, I thought it was 3.0.

I'm not convinced many people would recognize bits of TripOS in the source code, if it is 3.1. I doubt there is much there, apart from the underlying conventions. On the other hand, BCPL coded into C doesn't look like BCPL anymore. C optimized for C is a different story again.

(sigh)

[Pat the Cat]

Oh, I know very well about TRIPOS, so I didnt't feel a need to read wikipedia about it - not surprised some Amiga zealot have dumped in some misinformation about OS4 in there, don't know how many time I have removed bogus information about Amiga from wikipedia (such as IBM getting code to Workbench for use in OS/2 in exchange for CBM getting ARexx - you know, completely nutty "stories").

Yeah, like saying AmigaBasic was a Microsoft development.

It wasn't, it was a Metacomco development based on MS source. It's a crying shame how disinformation like that gets put on the internet...

:laughing::laughing::laughing:

If you think TripOS and Metacomco were and are irrelevant to the Amiga, you are wrong. In a big way. I did say it was a short read. I didn't say it was 100% accurate, but don't you think it can be useful to take a different perspective sometimes, rather than insisting that your own perspective is the only perspective?

[Pat the Cat]

Are you sure?

Metacomco shipped ABasiC (written in 'C') before Microsoft's AmigaBASIC was ready.

As far as I know AmigaBASIC is strongly related to Microsoft BASIC for Mac. As was common at the time, Commodore licensed Microsoft BASIC for the Amiga, with Microsoft creating the Amiga port. Commodore kept paying Microsoft for fixing implementation bugs over the years, but development work ceased by May 1991.

The AmigaBASIC we know from the Kickstart 1.x days had problems on 32 bit systems, e.g. using the 68020 and 68030 CPUs. On the Apple Macintosh it used to be common practice to make use of the restricted address space of the 68000 CPU, with the most significant 8 bits of an address pointer being ignored. Those 8 bits could be used for "pointer tagging", which the 68000 Macintosh operating system employed for memory management uses.

It's possible that the Kickstart 1.x version of AmigaBASIC used the same techniques, or at least assumed that it could tinker with these 8 bits without ill effect. Making AmigaBASIC work robustly on a 32 bit system might have been too expensive for Commodore.

It's also possible that AmigaBASIC was discontinued (I recall Dr. Peter Kittel mentioning that there was a version which ran fine on the Amiga 3000 and worked correctly with Kickstart/Workbench 2.0) because the need for a home computer to ship with BASIC was no longer a given. It certainly was about a decade ago.

So much for the myth of the Boing demo being written with a Microsoft product, eh... AFAIK, all MS did was sign a license and supply some source. They never actually "developed" AmigaBasic, so it was more a case of porting that ontop of the original Metacomco version. I did badger and probe Microsoft US about updates, back in the day, and was referred back to CBM with no response. Which was like being referred to the Wailing Wall, or the Ka'aba, really.

Anyway, ARexx was a much better choice, in my opinion. An ideal fit for a multitasking OS. Much much much more sensible than any version of Basic. Be able to talk and control between different running applications. That was a much more powerful tool than a programming language aimed at beginners.

[Pat the Cat]

Speculation: I suspect that one of the engineers took a last snapshot of everything before he left Commodore for a related job, e.g. at NewTek, Scala or 3DO. The time stamp of the last file modified is very, very close to the day when Commodore went bancrupt.

Indeed, but I did not look,  I used logic. The last known complete source distro of 3(.1) was CBM. Therefore, the leaker was once a CBM employee.

Thank you for helping to confirm my suspicions. I'm pretty sure I know who now.

The following may offend atheists, so look away now...


... God blesss 'em,  and all their leaks.

[Pat the Cat]

Well, instead they decided to include Arexx. Unlicensed, BTW, as far as I know.

Interesting. I never got feedback from IBM on Rexx. William (Bill?)l Hawes should know, one wasy or the other.