In court docs: Hyperion states AROS "probably illegal"

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Don't forget that at the time of the comment, AROS' name was basically "Amiga Operating System" with "Research" shoved in the middle. Why should AROS be allowed to call themselves "Amiga Research Operating System" if nobody else is allowed to call their OS "Amiga Operating System".

Thats what he was probably talking about, and it makes sense in the context of the lawsuit; they're talking about peoples permission to use the Amiga name and IP.

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... as an example, do you think Apple would be happy if I wrote an OS X compatible system called "Mac Research OS X"?

or Microsoft would allow "Microsoft Windows Research Vista"? Come on, they sued over "Lindows"!

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itix wrote:
How about applications like AmigaAmp? AmigaWriter? Whatever AmigaSomething apps are out there...

They quite possibly are on dodgy ground too, but they are slightly different in that they themselves are not in competition with any of Amigas products.

AROS is an operating system, but it is not an officially endorsed Amiga operating system, and i'm pretty sure if you owned the trademark "Amiga" and the Amiga Operating System rights, you could have the same rights to sue the makers of AROS the same way Microsoft sued over Lindows.

AROS have now removed Amiga from their name, which was a sensible move in the light of a seemingly well funded and litigeous Amiga, Inc.

If this wasn't the case, why isn't ReactOS called "Microsoft Windows Research NT" ? ;-)

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AJCopland wrote:
I doubt they're in danger, WinUAE, WinAmp, WinAce, WinZip. Are they in danger? Nope. They denote the platform they're targeted at nothing more.

Thats fine. I'm not arguing that point, but if someone made a product called "Microsoft Research Windows", they wouldn't get away with it, which is the *same* *thing* as AROS was until they changed their name, it was "Amiga Operating System" (ie AmigaOS), with Research shoved in the middle.

That is a legally questionable name.

You cannot stop someone from writing a compatible product which is what AROS aims to achieve.

I'm not questioning the legality of creating a compatible product. I never did. I'm just pointing out one possible reason why Everts statement, at the time, might not have been so bad.

Its a different matter now that the A in AROS stands for AROS ;-)

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Wasn't Amiga UNIX published by Commodore?

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Nice try. They're the Amiga ports of NetBSD and OpenBSD. Thats still not quite the same as "Amiga Research Operating System". If that was valid, then anyone could call their operating system "AmigaOS".

If you're so sure that its fine, prove it by releasing a fork of ReactOS called "Microsoft Research Windows" and see how long you last.

Or, why not try and sell PCs as "Sony Research Playstation 3"?

Or maybe buy a truck load of unbranded TV sets from the far east and sell them as "Sony Research Bravias"?

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CannonFodder wrote:
Why do you care?

I'm just playing devils advocate and putting forward a reason why Evert would say what he did in that email.