In court docs: Hyperion states AROS "probably illegal"

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IIRC back in the COSA days there was talk of use of Trademarks within the code being a potential hurdle to open source AmigaOS.  In particular things like the use of "Workbench screen" and "intuition".  That was one possible way that AROS could fall foul of Amiga Inc's lawyers.

However I did a quick check a few weeks back, and all of the trademarks that could potentially cause problems lapsed a long time ago, in many cases pre-Gateway.  So that should no longer be a threat.

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Piru wrote:
"Workbench" - even though a registered trademark - can be used if it is required for interoperability. Basically it need to be, as applications can try to lock public screen called "Workbench". Similarily some older apps might strcmp the window->ScreenTitle to detect the Workbench screen, so IMO use of the it is legimate in this context, too.

Same goes for "intuition.library", it must be called that or the library cannot be found. Intuition isn't listed in the amiga trademarks, however, or at least i could not find it from my AmigaOS 3.5 manual.

As I said, many of those trademarks lapsed long before Gateway got it's hands on them.  Even Commodore dropped the ball on a few of them while Amiga was still popular.

The point I was trying to make was that the closest thing to a legal argument that Amiga Inc. could possibly have is a complete dead-end.

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

Using someone else's trademark as part of your application name is not the smartest to do at the best of times, but for AROS is was particularly stupid.

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itix wrote:
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I dont think it was stupid because AROS was ever supposed to be "serious" project. It started as a research project.

So is that why it originally stood for Amiga Replacement Operating System?

http://web.archive.org/web/19980716222227/aros.fh-konstanz.de/aros/

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guru-666 wrote:
better question, why does ANYBODY care?

Because no-one wants to see AROS get caught up in a bunch of legal BS, particularly if it is easily avoided in the first place.