Just because you were unwilling or unable to license your OS 3.9 contribution to Cloanto does not mean others did exactly the same.
Could you please stop lying? ViNCEd, BenchTrash and IoTools are available for Cloanto and included. They asked for it, and I said that there is no problem including it for a free copy of AmigaForever. They did so, and I received my copy, so no problem. So I'm sorry to destroying your picture or me willing to stop Cloanto. I don't really care. I just don't like people wiggling around arrangements made in the past, and ignoring previous agreements because they no longer fit to their strategy. It is precisely that what happens now, on either side.
Just to state this again: The problem is really that I cannot give permission for things I do not own. It is really as simple as that.
Heinz had already made NSDpatch freely available for the Amiga community so I doubt he would have a problem with Cloanto distributing it.
Except that the problem is not NSDPatch, solely by Heinz (which is obsolete anyhow...). Heinz is the author of NSDPatch, so he can do with it whatever he likes, all provided he made a similar agreement with H&P compared to what I did. So thnigs are easy.
The problem is, just to note one component, that Heinz is not the only author of the scsi.device. So the question is whether Heinz did give permission for inclusion (I do not know) and whether Heinz was even in the position to do so (I do not know either, I can only state that I'm not for the shell and layers). And whether by including it in 3.x, Cloanto violated the exclusivity of the deveopment licence Hyperion holds.
That fact that H&P contracted out OS 3.9 development to various developers certainly left the door open for Cloanto once those contracts expired.
The situation is not *that* easy. It is easy in case the corresponding component had a single author. Heinz, for NSDPatch, or me for BenchTrash, ViNCEd and IOTools. Here, it depends on the type of contract between the author and H&P, which may or may not have been expired after 2 years, depending on negotiations.
The situation is incredibly more complicated for components that had been derived otherwise and had multiple authors. I do not know precisely which arrangements Heinz made there with H&P and/or Hyperion (as for Os 4 development), but I can only state that, for his contributions, Hyperion does have a license. Whether that allowed him to provide another license to Cloanto I do not know, and hence my question mark. It looks at least strange to me, but that's just between Hyperion, Cloanto and him.
I can only tell you that I cannot give out licenses for the shell or layers. These components are not mine, and have never been mine, and I am not in the position to provide licenses to things I do not own. All I have is a permission to distribute updates on Aminet, which is less than providing licences to another party.
So, no, the world isn't black and white. It is just an incredibly complicated legal mess we're sitting at, and I am certainly not willing of getting intertwined by all this mess by easily passing out software that is not entirely my own.