Look , the idea of a car or a computer or an operating system IS "open source" ;BUT you aren't LEGALLY allowed to make an exact copy of anything still protected by patents or copyrights and sell or give away copies without the patent or copyright holders' permission.You may make a car,but not a close copy of a Ford,nor can you call your car a Ford.
Now is that concept too limiting for you?
Then have the laws changed or ignore them as you like,and see what happens.
By the way,several "totally harmless" T-shirt vendors are likely to face FELONY counterfeiting charges for selling NFL team logo wear at a big flea market near here.And previously several vendors of pirated movies have been shut down ..
But football is "open source";you CAN play football all you want,but you just can't declare your team official NFL without the league's agreement.
Now maybe you can explain just why Hyperion would give away that which they have fought for years in court to obtain? Or are you going to say the court decision isn't legitimate?
I think you are free to write your own OS ,beginning from scratch,which will run on Amiga hardware .After all,some versions of linux run on Apple hardware ;but again,the don't try to call it Mac OS because Apple has the legal rights.
WTF dude!!, this discussion is about whether (theoretically) Amiga OS should be open sourced NOT about pirating/stealing/counterfeiting it.
Unless you are SCO's lawyer these are not the same thing
By open sourcing the owners of software (i know nothing about open source cars) open up the source to the world in general and to the developer community in particular and allow that code to be modified and distributed (depending on the license the code is released under). A great example is Sun's open sourcing of Solaris, the Solaris community was able to expand and port the OS and Sun benefited from having a much larger pool of developers working on there OS, and were able to back port software and drivers to there commercial release. Unfortunatly this was to little to late for Sun as there market was been continually encroached upon by ever more powerful X86 cpu's and linux.
Personally I believe that the only way to get the Amiga any market share is to open source it (even then it would be a tiny share). But I also believe that this will not happen in the foreseeable happen now Hyper-ron have the rights and can sell X1000's to the few dozen fanboys who will buy it and OS4 at the undoubtedly extortionate prices. As long as Hyper-ron want the Amiga tied to there expnsive hardware then it will never be opened up.
To quote Richard Stallman "Think free as in free speech, not free beer.".
Gaz
