For the last few months I've been making sporadic attempts to locate the copyright holder in the Amiga ROMs, with a view to allowing Raspberry Pi users to legally use emulators like UAE. Unfortunately I've met with little success.
Can someone enlighten me as to where the copyrights currently reside?
Eben Upton
Executive Director, Raspberry Pi Foundation
Welcome! You've stumbled into a minefield regarding the Amiga's Kickstart ROMs. Even the so-called Amiga Inc.'s ownership of them is in dispute. We, as a collective community, have been trying to figure out definitive ownership for years.
As others have said, Cloanto and AROS are probably your best bets. If Cloanto can't license you the ROMs directly, they can probably license you Amiga Forever, which would be a neat, all-in-one solution. It might be a little more expensive per unit, but it will probably pay for itself in terms of reduction of headaches and legal nonsense with Amiga Inc. and other litigious entities.
AROS will be free, or close to it, but it's not as out-of-the box as Amiga Forever. You'd gain some performance in that it would be running natively on the Pi's CPU, but said CPU may not have enough horsepower to power many of the modern AROS applications. Then again, it may - I'm not sure. You'd still be under emulation for the "classic" stuff, albeit in a more integrated way.
