Workbench Disk Sets... What Would Be The Best Way To Obtain Them...

[Piru]

So you contact AI from links/email their webpage for 6 months and no replies.

You contact Petro from his facebook, and get bad translations that says, "I give free long time ago."

You find no other records.

You put the disks up on a site for people with old rotting disks for some obsolete turd machines to DL to make backups from.


You get crapped on.


Hmmmm..... seems fair.

Yes. It's a fair response for such stupidity.

Seriously though, morality and legality hardly ever meet. It sucks, but such is life.. unfair.

[Piru]

if I want to distribute Workbench disks Piru, who should I contact?

I don't know.

Again I should point out that regardless what you might consider moral thing to do might not necessarily be legal.

[Piru]

In fact, it could be a legally recommended step if he has already taken appropriate actions to try to contact the legal copyright holder...

I fail to see how. Regardless whether the copyright owner reacts or not, it still is and will remain an infringement.

Trademarks need to be defended, however.

[Piru]

But I'm not sure Commodore WERE the only copyright holder. For certain aspects of Workbench they were a licensee... for example, Commodore's license for the Narrator library expired in 1991 - which is why it wasn't included in later versions of Workbench. Cloanto had to license that independently, which they did for the first time in 2002. I think there were other components of Workbench for which Commodore was a licensee, e.g. ARexx and Memacs?

So to get the original Workbench disks released into the public domain, you'd probably need to get a whole list of copyright holders to contact, not just the entity which has inherited all of Commodore's copyrights. I get the impression Cloanto have done this.

You make a very good point here. Several components have had their licensing issues, like you point out, at least ARexx and narrator. Later on Haage&Partner did their own share by including an illegal copy of Genesis TCP/IP stack to AmigaOS 3.9.

Cloanto were very careful to sort out these issues in their distributions. Here are some details: http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/15-107

[Piru]

Look it's very obvious that yourself and "Steino" are associated in some way with Cloanto

Hey you forgot me! Certainly Cloanto must be paying me or something because I don't agree with you.

[Piru]

I really couldn't give a -=Moderated=- anymore about it or the so called Amiga Community

Does this also mean that you will be leaving this site? I can't claim I'd miss you if you did.

[Piru]

trying to prevent genuine Amiga hardware users from being able to obtain easily some very old software that no-one who allegedly owns it could care less about...

At least I personally have absolutely no problem with someone downloading a Workbench disk ADF to replace a dead one. In my view they can consider the download as being a "remote backup" of their original disk.

I don't fit your description though. I have two amigas at home and I do use the A500 occasionally.

Cloanto, despite not being the copyright holders are the only party guilty of preventing this 20 odd year old software from being made easily and legally available to those who still wish to obtain it...

They're both obliged to take action (see http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-122: "When we receive reports about web sites which are claimed to provide such files, we are obliged by law and by contract to take some action.") and it's sensible course of action to protect their investment.

I can carry on quietly with my original intention of getting to the bottom of all this

Good luck with this endeavour. I hope you'll use less controversial methods in the future though.