[Vampire] OS3.x VS AROS

[Gulliver]

You most certainly can steer development of your own fork of ANY opensource project.

 You are not required to continue down the path of the main branch.   Hell for that matter the dos.library of MorphOS is a fork of the dos.library of AROS.  looks to me they controlled the direction they wanted to go with it pretty well(they are now very different).  I could list some other parts used by MorphOS or AOS4 but I'm lazy.

If I remember correctly, also a few gadgets were also backported from Aros to AmigaOS 3.9.

[Gulliver]

So how I see it to go Thomas Richters route:
Pay Hyperion lots of money for the license
Pay the owner of P96 for a license
Pay  one or more developers for adapting both (in case of 3.1 you certainly  need to sign NDAs what reduces the number of developers being able to do  that)

And then you are very much dependent on the owner of 3.1., you cannot fork and develop in a different direction.

Then what is what you pay for? Just a binary?

I do not see any sense in that...

As much as I would like to see a new version of AmigaOS for Amigas, Olaf seems to have it right in pointing out the huge effort required.

Fork Aros is the name of the game.