I think the best thing for true Amiga diehards to do is to treat all these fighting parties like children: "I don't care who hit who first, you're going to have to all get along, OR ELSE."
We, the real Amiga base, lose whenever these suits start wars with each other. The best thing for us to do, is to express equal displeasure to all of them, and tell them all to just give up a few inches in an effort to save the ship.
BTW, Gateway owns the hardware patents (they're not dummies), and IIRC the "software patents" (a stupid US notion if I ever heard one). Amino/Amiga ostensibly owns the OS and WB from 3.1 and earlier.
However, I've seen an article that says a German court ruled that in the Escom-to-Gateway sale (which took place under German jurisdiction), Escom never actually sold the OS rights to Gateway (possibly becase Escom may have never had clear title to it - not sure, the translation is rough). It is possible that technically, the OS may be in legal limbo which would make this current spat moot.
I'm no fan of Amiga Inc's turning the Amiga into a generic Mac-like off--the-shelf box of parts... hence I haven't been following everything real closey. So if anybody could point (URL) me to statements from all concerned parties, I'd appreciate it.
But I seem to recall the Amithlon is just an AMD-enhanced UAE, and that AmigaOS/XL is QNX with an abstraction layer to redirect AmigaOS calls to analagous QNX routines (and supply AmigaOS-compatible routines where analagous routines don't exist in QNX).
I also seem to clearly recall that Bill and Fleecy were heralding Amithlon and AmigaOS-XL as GREAT things.
It seems to me the underpinning of so many of these OS-ownership/license spats come out of both legitimate concern for control of their respective work/products, the AmigaOS (Amiga Inc has abandoned true Amiga hardware, not to mention featuresets), greed, fear, uncertainty but ALSO a lack of understanding about the absurd technology IP laws (WIPO is insane) as they differ from ethical expectations-- in other words, what IS vs. what SHOULD be law. The fact that differing countries come into play really makes this more complicated (ironically, WIPO could actually expedite a resolution if worse came to worse- although it could easily be the *wrong* solution). Sad to say but the Amiga (such as the brand name persists) is once again being bettered about by legal confusion * international differences in said law. Since all parties have valid concerns, they should all just GROW UP and try to work together.
If these guys can't sort things out, we, the long-suffering users, lose out. Go tell them. If we can't get all sides to give in just a little, there'll be no amicable resolution.
