The story I heard is that commodore begat escom begat amiga technlogies who had those valuable patents to technologies that gateway wanted to have the rights to in their own designs.
So Amiga Tech went to gateway and when amiga wanted to make a computer/multimedia box/set top that competed directly with something they were doing in conjunction with microsoft, they used it as leverage on them working with microsoft which they wanted. Microsoft anti-ed up so the Amiga team and everyone was kinda hung out to dry and told not to compete.
Amiga was viewed as a "software company" not a hardware company by gateway, and they offered their ex-amiga folks there the rights to use the name and produce AmigaOS based products.
I am guessing since gateway still owns a lot of the patents that they don't have the right to do anything competitive (like the walker proto) at this time. This is strictly a guess on my part. I have no idea how true this story would be, but that would explain why they are having other companies sell boxes.
I would like the E True Hollywood story on this one folks, I'd pay to see it..
