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Author Topic: Consequences of the AmigaOS 3.1 source code "leak", one year after?  (Read 37236 times)

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Offline psxphill

Quote from: Thomas Richter;818883
If you leave this bad code to open source, you might get good code in the end, but no compatibility. BPTRs, BSTRs? Away with this nonsense. Legacy GlobVec initialization in dos.library? Away with this crap. graphics.library workarounds for bad programs? Sorry for them, away with the junk...

Implementation and interfaces are two different things. So BPTR/BSTR/GlobalVev should always be part of an open source amigaos, no matter what language it ultimately ended up in. Bonus points if you can pursuade a c++ compiler to create 100% compatible libraries using a simple class and convert BPTR & BSTR to real pointers.

workrounds are always a problem as they are necessary because one thing assumes something about another thing that was never guaranteed. There are workrounds for hardware bugs, which might need changing when you make an unrelated change for example. For that you need to do decent testing, whether it's open source or not won't make a difference to that.
« Last Edit: January 03, 2017, 04:32:08 PM by psxphill »
 

Offline psxphill

Re: Consequences of the AmigaOS 3.1 source code "leak", one year after?
« Reply #1 on: January 14, 2017, 09:56:00 PM »
Quote from: Pat the Cat;819651
I'm not saying there isn't such a direct path of transfer, but I think anybody trying to demonstrate proof of ownership to the copyrighted sourrce code is going to have a hard time of it - they'd have to show an agreement with the CBM liquidators, who were based in the Bahamas, as a starting point, which would include the term. If it wasn't included in the break up of CBM, it was never transferred from CBM.

It supposedly was....

http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/escombuys.html

"The transaction includes all rights to intellectual property"

I'm sure there will be a paper trail somewhere.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2017, 09:58:26 PM by psxphill »
 

Offline psxphill

Re: Consequences of the AmigaOS 3.1 source code "leak", one year after?
« Reply #2 on: January 15, 2017, 04:42:15 PM »
Quote from: Thomas Richter;819770
This is clause 1d) of the agreement. One way or another, this copyright hand-over never happened, and Amiga Inc. is still registered at the US copyright office. See above for the link.

The US hasn't required registration since it joined the Berne convention in 1989 (not requiring registration is one of the requirements of signing up to the Berne convention). You CAN register with the copyright office if you want everyone to know who to contact. However in terms of copyright ownership, it's largely irrelevant. You don't need to have registered your copyright to issue a DMCA takedown. Supposedly to get awarded damages in court you need to have it registered, but that goes against the Berne convention (especially for owners outside the US).

Neither Hyperion or Cloanto are US companies. So they are unlikely to worry too much what the US copyright office or supreme courts say especially as I don't think Hyperion or Cloanto are going to take anyone to court in the US to get damages from them, while their agreements and previous case rulings are enough to protect themselves in court.

Quote from: Minuous;819763
Amino were willing to relinquish most of their IP for $1?

It's hard to transfer legal ownership without consideration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration_under_American_law

If two parties are suing each other and want to escape from the court case then they will often do deals like this where property changes hands. A famous example is DEC suing Intel and when they settled in 1997 and Intel agreed to buy StrongARM from DEC for $700 million https://www.cnet.com/news/intel-digital-settle-suit/. The money was essentially damages for the technology that Intel stole, but DEC also got to offload StrongARM as they weren't able to make money out of it. Intel kept it going for a while, but in 2006 they sold it to marvell for $600 million.

Amiga Inc agreed to sell it to a specific person for as part of a bigger deal, a random stranger wouldn't have been able to jump in and offer $2.
« Last Edit: January 15, 2017, 05:30:56 PM by psxphill »