@ Minuous
I agree with your point that the masses, at least the majority of the Amiga Community thinks that Cloanto's licensing of ROM is the only way. It is true to a marketing standpoint of licensing, but I agree with you on Cloanto's domination of the Kickstart ROM images on the Emulation Market. They do have a monopoly on licensing Amiga ROMs and the Workbench Disks. They get all the press coverages on the web, classic gaming expo, and such.
To me, that's evil, but for now its the only way. Now, I don't have an actual Amiga 500 or any Amiga machine at my disposal, but I don't want to hack out the ROM and transfer it to my PC. That takes a long time and I'm not a hardware guru.
I think what you want is another alternative besides Cloanto and transrom. I wish there is a competitor, not to my knowledge. I have learned to like Cloanto, but I don't like their bloated menu frontend to Winuae or their customer service. I like them because they're part of the Amiga Community, they're part of the original boat of developers from wayback. The ROMS breathe life to UAE in general. Without it, WINUAE or UAE is just a stupid application file.
Sure I can download them from a torrent site if I want to, but as an Amiga Fan, I shelled out money to pay for Amiga ROMS, equivalent to buying a real machine, but way cheaper.
I cared about the early developers and those at Commodore who devoted their lives to Amiga. I bought my ROMs not just to have a clear conscience, but to honor the past.
I bought ROMs too to become part of the community, even though I use a PC to run my Amiga games and Software - Accessibility.
I just wish as an alternative, there would be an open source kickstart from GPL. I guess that would make some happy. Hey anything can be open-sourced right? Why not.
As Amiga citizens, What we should be fighting is Apple and Microsoft, not Cloanto.
:-D