I don't see what the big deal is. Jens owns a business. Jens legally owns an intellectual property. Why should he give that up? He has every right to protect ownership of his property and do with it what he wishes.
Yup.
Tell you guys a little parallel story...
Back ages ago (like...2003? 2004? Don't rightly recall...anyway...) I wanted to upgrade to a motherboard with PCI-e, specifically one I could run dual video cards in (at the time, 8800GTX cards which were top-of-the-line). However I am a budget PC building kind of guy on and off and I wanted a board I could put my single-core AMD Athlon XP 3000+ in and save some cash. I looked high and low and finally settled on an Epox motherboard that had dual PCIe and their own home-grown SLI solution ("GLI").
Now...my own fault for not doing my homework, but in the interim, nVidia had cornered the market on any kind of dual-card solution: if you wanted SLi, you bought an nVidia-supported (which back then meant Intel) board, period. GLi was clean-room engineered by Epox, so nVidia bought the technology and then promptly ****canned the design and wrote further drivers to
not support SLi on that series board. I was crestfallen but within a few days, I found some hacked drivers created by a group of programmers that would work on ANY board with ANY nVidia card by misidentifying the chipset to the driver.
So that's what I used until I upgraded to my Asus board, dual core athlon, etc.
Was nVidia "right" to extend, embrace and exterminate? From a business standpoint, possibly. But ultimately it was their decision to do so. I found a work-around and went for it. I spread the word as best I could (but let's admit it, on the PC side of the world there couldn't have been too many people in my situation), kept using updated nVidia hardware, and until I upgraded a few years later, all was well. Coincidentally, by that point SLi solutions were "out of the barn" and nVidia had pretty much licensed it anyway!
But the point is, I never felt cheated or slighted or taken advantage of by nVidia. Had I not been able to use both cards, I'd have sold one, or bided my time until I got a new board, etc.
Jens is like nVidia in this: there's a product he wanted off the market and he spent
his money to get it off the market. Out of his pocket. Not yours, not mine, he didn't hack someone's bank account to buy up the Apollo tech. And he's like the guys who wrote the altered drivers: he's offering a non-trivial method for people who want to keep using/trying that hardware. Personally? I think he's well in his rights. It isn't like he's writing drivers that screw up your hard drive (hi, Elbox! Yes you're still ****lords!) or posting threatening messages like "PAY ME FOR THIS HARDWARE OR I WILL DESTROY IT." (Hi, Hans Campbell! You're a ****lord, too!).
Jens makes great hardware, he supports it to the best of his ability*, the Amiga does
not make him a great deal of money, so ultimately, yeah, he's doing the Amiga community a favor by building what he does.