OS3.9 BB3+4 V1.2 Available

[kolla]

Why and how is this thread allowed on this site?

[kolla]

Why shouldn't it be?

Because it is a link to a file filled with unlicensed copyrighted material, such as the latest update that, from what I understand, comes from the leaked OS3.1 source archive (the v42.x items).

Why you always gotta be so  **** negative?  

Because I do not like double-standards and hypocrisy - on the a-eon sites I risk getting banned for expressing my view on copyrights, yet in other threads, people are cheered for explicitly posting links to copyright infringing files.

[kolla]

So, what are these then?

Changes between V1.11 and V1.2:
Updated Clock from 40.1 to 42.1.
Updated iffparse.library from 40.1 to 42.2.
Updated CrossDOSFileSystem from 40.19 to 40.24.
Updated Wait from 37.3 to 42.1.
Updated Sort from 37.3 to 42.1.
Updated BindDrivers from 38.2 to 42.1.
Added led.image 42.2.
Added MacPaint datatype 42.1.
Added ICO datatype 42.1.
Added PCX datatype 42.1.

[kolla]

I personally gave permission (where I could and where I was asked) for my stuff, but that might not go for anything in this archive. It's at least dubious.

Did you give permission for this?

bash-3.2$ lha v BoingBags3\&4.lha | grep shell-seg
[unknown]                16950   29092  58.3% -lh5- d480 Jan 10 02:50 boingbag3.9-3&4/files1/l/shell-seg
bash-3.2$


That is - this is not patches, these are fully patched binaries, distributed around as half-official.

If Cosmos was doing this, it would be havoc.

[kolla]

One way or another, this stuff should go unless the uploader clarifies where it came from and whether it was redistributed with permission.

What do you mean by "should go"? The person who is distributing this boingbag is posting right here in this thread. Shouldn't you be all over him?

[kolla]

No, I don't mind the links, I mind the double standards.

[kolla]

Instead of everyone assuming "OMG they don't have rights to distribute this stuff", how about everybody just assume that they do, until proven otherwise?

Because it is glaringly obvious that it is not the case? Who would give permission to distributr the old bits and pieces from OS 3.2 anyhow?

Anyhow, I just wanted to point out the double standards here.

[kolla]

Look, to be frank, you do not know that, and you do not know where the components came from. They could be home-made like Peter K's icon.library.

Are you for real?! How... dumb do you think I am?!

It doesn't strike you as odd that those new v42 binaries that suddenly show up out of nowhere, all exists in the v42 directory of the leaked sources? Even the version strings are _exact_ the same. For example the sort command "sort 42.1 (9.8.93)"

Does that look "home made" for you?

Sheesh!

[kolla]

And who in this day and time makes datatypes for ancient windows icon format, macpaint and PCX? All those are formats that belong back in the 1993, not in 2016.

[kolla]

I just do not understand why you are so involved there?

I am not, not like this takes much energy or anything. Besides, there is a certain element of entertainment.

[kolla]

Now what?

Indeed, now what? The sources are now de facto open source, anyone with an interest can and will find them, learn from them, use them, take inspiration from them, change them, compile them...  may even attract new developers and users. Isn't it wonderful?

Is it a "great contribution to community" to supply it with pirated software?

Thanks, this really helps a lot.

 
Like so many things in life, it is all about how we cope with things, that matter. Anyone can be heart broken, but it is how you deal with that matters. You may choose to remain wounded and miserable, or you may choose to accept the reality of things, and find joy and opportunities in a new reality.

I know what I would do if I was Cloanto or/and Hyperion, the Amiga "market" is not big, but it does have a lot of skillful and dedicated people, we are after all still here. Very few of us have time and resources to work full time under NDAs by these companies, but plenty have time for the occasional hacking, and todays revision control systems are all built around code reviewing. So what is there to lose. Look at the confusion surrounding the new Cloanto kickstarts, where we don't really know what they are made of, and people are reporting problems with certain pieces of hardware. I know this happens, I build my own kickstarts exactly for this reason. I have been thinking of putting up a web service where people can build their own kickstarts, cherrypicking the bits and pieces, with profile management where you can choose for which hardware you build, which OS level etc. And anyone can register their own kickstart profiles for later use.

[kolla]

No, the sources are exactly not "open source". The sources might be available on some torrents, in the same sense pirated movies might be available on some torrents, but that makes them neither "open". It remains illegal, no matter what, and certainly not "open source". In specific, this makes it impossible to sell them or base products on them, or to create services around them.

Right. Have you traveled much? I have spent quite some time in Russia, Ukraine, all over eastern Europe, Turkey, and lately Latin America. If there is one thing that is to be said about copyrights in these vast areas of the world, it must be that they are not at all respected. Not by people in general, and certainly not by governments. So how illegal is it then.

Hold on a minute. Try, just for a second, to put yourself into the feet of Cloanto or Hyperion. You have paid $$$ for the sources and the licenses, and even paid $$$ for some #?$@$!! lawyers to ensure your rights in court.

Yeah, pretty lame wasting all that money on lawyers and dragging this nonsense through the courts, which are pretty much paid for by tax money, huh. One would think all that money could have been spent better elsewhere.

And then somebody comes along and requests this stuff for free? Oh, and by the way, your investment goes down the drain because you cut yourself off from any market?

You are really stuck on this "for free" thing. Just because something is open source does not mean it comes for free. Over the years I have invested a lot of money in open source projects, to help pay for infrastructure, server space, storage and yes - man power. I would be happy pay a subscription for AmigaOS if it meant the sources were around for anyone to contribute, and with a handfull of skillful people like yourself to do code review. I am not at all willing to waste more money on the "status quo" of things in Amiga land.

Now, I really pushing hard to get something like a new official kickstart for the classics, and I'm talking to people here and there to get things arranged so we get back some progress, and some $#$@$!! moron takes at the same time the sources and claims everything is just ok?

There already are new so called official kickstarts for the Amiga, Cloanto have released quite a few already. Doesn't help much if they don't work with your hardware though.

As for whether it is "just ok" or not that the sources are out there, is really irrelevant - the point is that the sources _are_ out there, and there is nothing you, Hyperion or Cloanto can do that will ever change that. So instead of behaving like Lemmings about to blow up, how about changing strategies and attitudes, and make the best out of the situation.

Activities exactly like this *kill* the Amiga and any future development and cut it off from any market.

Only thing killed here is your visions and ideas about what could have been. Well, boohoo, maybe time to make small adjustments to your visions and ideas, and imagine what can be done to make the situation less hostile for everybody.

I have no problem with AROS and OpenSource - if people started cleanly from scratch and create a new and open operating system for the classics that's all fine with me. It's from hobbyists to hobbyists, all ok and a great movement. But that's *quite* something different than actively supporting piracy. Open Source means exactly that: Creating yourself *and not stealing* and publishing stolen software. That is not open source, that's just theft. I'm sorry you don't get the difference.

Arguments over semantics does't change the situation. There are many types of open source, some of them goes under the umbrella of "free open source software" (AKA FOSS), others do not. It is not as if FSF etc have ownership over the concept, open source as a concept does't even relate with copyrights, and there are plenty of open source projects that are not endorses by FSF etc. Open source just means exactly that - that the sources are out in the open, how they got there is not really relevant as such, hence my use of "de facto open source". And yes, open source software can also be so called pirated software, does not mean it is less open source.

[kolla]

That is part of my job, Kolla. Still illegal. That doesn't make any difference. Why should it?

As someone else pointed out earlier, anything you can get away with, can be considered legal. Companies steal from each other on a regular basis, Chinese companies are notoriously known for stealing ideas, code and production methods from the west. In China that is "business as usual". In the US they have no/few issues with stealing from Europe, and patent it there. What is "legal" is _very_ gray.

Tax money? Oh come on.

Yes. The courts are still not private enterprises are they?

To make money with open source, you need to be able to offer some service around your product. Now what would this service possibly be, and would you pay for it?

AmigaForever - why are people buying it? They can just download WinUAE and download stuff, right?

I give you a hint: Open source service contracts are made between industrial parties that use open source software in large scale, and for whom it pays to offload the work to somebody else. Our computing center runs its servers on Linux, and we pay money for that. The private user does not.

Really. So why is there a VPS market? Amazon, Linode, Digital Ocean, Serve The World, Dreamiest etc... all offering cheap server to private users.

Now, where exactly is the market for an OpenSource AmigaOs? And who would pay for it? Come on, be a little creative!

Yes, that is the AmigaOS I would pay for - the closed source model we have now? Nope, I am not paying anything more for that, I already have paid it up and down umpteen times and has not really moved _anywhere_.

Well, just to pick some random company... what is Cloanto selling again?

No, not *YOU* Kolla. Your university. That's a difference.

What? You have misunderstood, I do not work for a university. I work for  a "GmbH" company, which currently is owned by the state. That may change. The main function of the company is to be the "ISP" if you like, for the universities, research and educational institutions, competing with the "private" to provide the best, most advanced and cheapest solution for the sector. The universities are customers. NASA and ESA are also customers.

And a bug NO - in the context here, I was talking about what I _personally_ have paid, and still are paying.

How much have *you* *personally* paid from *your* *private* pocket?

A lot, unsure if I can manage to sum it up. I have bought Suse, I donated to Fedora and even Ubuntu. I bought LinuxPPC back in the days, I even bought Debian 2.0 for m68k. I supported the Directory Opus Magellan liberation with USD150 and was ready to pay more. I have donated to various other Power2People projects, some have made it, some have not. I should definitely donte more to AROS. I buy "merch" from various projects and sites - including this one, just a few months ago - to support them. I%&$#?@!hosted "Back2Roots" for a long time together with a buddy, and also some other Amiga related boards. I have a large handfull of personal servers located around the world, using DO and Linode, that I pay for every month. Likewise I use storage providers that use, offer and promote open source products. I donate to Wikipedia. I am EFF member. I am an ISOC member. I am a USENIX member. I support Linux Academy. And I just realized I should donate to FS-UAE development too. So who knows how much I really pay every year out of my pockets for all this, and more. On the other hand, I do not have a car, my apartment is only 34 square meters, and do know how to live cheaply when I have to.

I personally paid for Crossover Office because I need it for my work, but except that, the linux distributions I use come for free and offer what I need.

So, you are in it for the "gratis" of it while some of us contribute with our own hard earned money. That is your choice. You are welcome.

If I paid, I paid by contributing to Linux.

Which you were paid to do, from what I understand, right?

Ok, can we setup a poll here in this forum how much people would realistically pay for it? In the end, it is not me who has to be convinced. I personally do not care about open or closed source.

You have made it explicitly clear many times, typically in a very patronizing way, that you do not condone any "open source" model for AmigaOS, that it would not work, because... you think it would be a mess.

I care about "it works or it does not". Given the current development, and all the theft of software, I have clear doubts of this would work in any way. It would end up in a mess...

Right. So you prefer the status quo, which already is a mess, how could it possible become more messy than it already is.

The problem is that I have my doubts in the amount of people that would pay, and in the discipline users would show in supporting such a project. Threads like this show exactly that. Lack of testing, lack of code review, lack of professionalism, probably due to lack of resources.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with it all being "illegal", right?

How many times have you seen people suggest that there should be a kickstarter to pay out the Amiga OS sources and end the current circus?

Remember the A1200 case kickstarter? That was people who together was willing to more than 150 thousand euros for plastic cases and merch.

Given the available amount of development power, the consequence should be not to release kickstarts as hardware anyhow, but I'm saying this for years. A ROM needs to be a very stable, robust, well-reviewed and well-tested software. You do not get this with the couple of folks left.

And with the current "model of business", we are guaranteed that there never, or very rarely, will be _new_ people who can learn and take part. The Amiga community is nowadays literally dying. Of old age.

The situation is that some money needs to be invested to make this happen, and it does not exactly rain from the sky.

How much revenue does AmigaOS generate today? Enough? Or is it mostly "a hobby", a side project, for the companies involved too?

I have my doubts that OpenSource works as a pay-able product for a user community that consist exclusively of private users.

How do you consider the Haiku community?

http://www.haiku-inc.org/donations-analysis.php

It does work if you have industrial or large scale applications where service contracts are needed. The business case is quite a different one. You cannot just compare Linux and AmigaOs.

I would never dream of doing such a thing. A much more relevant comparison would be that of the MiNT and other Atari systems. Or Haiku, Reactos etc. The biggest issue with Amiga is the fractioning, if at least AROS and OS3.x could be brought together without a huge legal circus, it would be a huge gain IMO.

But as you mention it - is it not true that _most_ Linux distributions, are aimed at the private user, and _not_ enterprise users? For example ElementaryOS. For example Mint. Both receiving donations from their private users. Typically, the "enterprise" focus that shows up late in a distribution's life span, like it did with Ubuntu. Like it did with SuSe.

The situation is that there is some need for investment, and this investment needs to come from somewhere. Visions? Do I have one? "If you have a vision, see a doctor". I can only tell you that this project needs honest users (which is not exactly given) that are willing to pay (which I have my doubts on).

There will always be free riders (like you, obviously), and there will always be people willing to pay. The main benefit though, is that it would make it so much easier to actually make some progress - any progress. Today the situation is that only a small group is willing to for the status quo. And they are getting old and gray.

And once again, I'm probably stupid enough not to ask for money for it. But it still requires some money to organize the whole show and keep things together, to compile distributions and so on.

 

Correct, it does. And look, AROS already does this, nightly builds and all. How rich AROS must be. Again, I must remember to contribute.

No, kolla. Sorry. This is outright nonsense. Open source software means that it is released and licensed under some kind of open source software to the user. Depending on your flavour of free, FREE, Phre, Frei,or whatever license you pick or which freedom you prefer. Pirated software is exactly not licensed to the user, and you cannot obtain ownership on a stolen thing.

Again arguing over semantics rather than implications. Do you see the difference between pirated software that is compiled binaries, and pirated source code? Any... practical implications that make those two different? What is your term for source code that anyone can get hold of, but that is not under a license that permits it? Just "illegal source code" I suppose.

[kolla]

Probably to add to the above: How exactly should I convince someone to invest money into the Amiga community if the community rather prefers to use stolen software? As this thread demonstrates?

The  community prefers to use legal software, but circumstances makes it pretty damn hard, if not impossible to have any kind of progress "legally". THAT is the situation, and has been for more than 15 years. Why do you say that you are the one who must convince someone to invest in the community? I rather you don't, as your views are clearly skewed and biased towards towards a model that... I suppose... would give you more control, or something. I don't know.

As I said, threads like this, with download links like this, are *not exactly helpful*.

They are a consequence of the everlasting status quo. Again, people are dying. People hope to experience _something_ before they hit the grave, when you get old, respect for silly stuff like copyright infringements of ancient software becomes something you do care much about... what could possibly happen, at worst some besserwisser German on some random web-board will yell at you. No big deal.

How can one expect that the people that applaud to uploaded stolen software will, in the end, pay for an open source software?

For so many of us, it would rectify the big mistake it was that it did not happen already way back right after CBM folded. And today, people much more understand that even open source software needs funding, but at least, as long as a community exists, open source software does not just straight out die. Closed source software on the other hand, comes with death warranty.

This somehow does not fit together. Anyhow, try to convince me that you're willing to pay for Open Source. As said, I do not mind *how* AmigaOs is distributed. If it works, it works.

Again, look at Haiku, look at ElementaryOS, look at ReactOS etc... even AROS. How much revenue can you generate by using the community in a positive way, rather than treating the community as potential criminals? Which is exactly what you are illustrating so magnificently on this thread, and other threads.

[kolla]

The ICO format is the standard for a web site's "favicon," so it is at least still relevant in 2016.

Fair point, though you can specify different format using MIME types, very often it would be PNG that is actually used.

I guess that depends.  'round here you pay a lot of court fees and costs as part of your filings and proceedings.

Of course, but the courts are not private enterprises with expected profits.