My evening with Commodore USA, LLC

[takemehomegrandma]

Thanks for the report!

That C64 looks very interesting! I think it will sell *a lot*!

[takemehomegrandma]

Legal or ethical?  Their ethics stink.

Then we have Hyperion, who was contracted by Amiga Inc to do 4 months of developing work (some carefully defined work tasks, as outlined by the Friedens themselves) for which they would get a specified sum of money.

The four months passed. *Years* passed. But Hyperion never delivered according to their contract. Instead they simply took the money, held the code hostage for years while hoping for Amiga Inc to die, constantly FUD'ing MorphOS in the meantime in order to sabotage its market (this one is a personal favorite of mine: "The failure of Amiga Inc and the MorphOS team to come to terms is in part due to the fact that Amiga wants to assert their ownership and intellectual property rights over the Amiga OS (for which they paid 4.5 M USD) whilst the MorphOS team happily continues to refute those claims", as it so beautifully pictures the hypocrisy of Hyperion and irony of the situation that came to follow).

Then they try to rob Amiga Inc of their IP, but luckily the resulting "settlement" (cough cough) didn't result in a transfer of ownership of the Amiga IP to this mediocre Linux game porting company, and I'm glad that their products won't be called "Amiga", but amigaos or amigaone. Because Hyperion's ethics stinks, and so does their code, and nobody gave them the right to proclaim "Amiga" to be the degraded mishmash of poor performing code, poor and partly broken Amiga compatibility, relying on the second class Amiga API's and standards, Linux API's, lacking important standards, etc, and tying it to usury priced HW of poor performance and dubious quality. So I'm glad they aren't allowed to sell it as "Amiga"; since this will make it easier to advice people to stay clear from Hyperion's products without necessarily staying clear of "Amiga".

AFAIK, Commodore has a valid agreement with the IP owner to use the *Amiga* brand. This is very legal, and compared to what Hyperion has done during the last years, it's *very* ethical!

[takemehomegrandma]

Hyperion won in court, that's good enough for me.

No they didn't. They settled. And how you can regard the terms in settlement a victory for hyperion is beyond me...

[takemehomegrandma]

When did Amiga Inc lose the amigaOS4 court case?

They didn't, some people are just confused (some people even believes Hyperion owns the OS and owns the Amiga trademarks, which they of course don't).

Here is the situation after the settlement:

Hyperion has built a house (OS4). They have built it by heavily relying on construction materials (Amiga OS 3.1) that are *loaned* (and then they added their own stuff to the construction as well).

Hyperion actually acknowledge in the settlement that the loaned bricks and planks (Amiga OS 3.1) used to build the OS4 house are indeed owned by Amiga Inc. And then Amiga Inc acknowledge in the settlement that the house is owned by Hyperion, *except* for the loaned bricks and planks they used to actually build the house, which *are still* owned by Amiga Inc!

Now, who owns the house?

And to connect to the quoted statement above, is there really *any* winners from way the court case ended?

[takemehomegrandma]

The old adage is that a settlement is succesful if both sides extricate themselves with an equal amount of disappointment.

Indeed, well put.

[takemehomegrandma]

Hyperion has the exclusive right to market, develop, sell AmigaOS 4. AFAIK they are not legally bound to PPC anymore. I think Hyperion would consider this advantageous for them.

If some rich entity would turn up at Hyperion's office and say: "Hey, that's one cool OS you have got going there, Can I Byu It? I'd offer $50 millions!", then Hyperion *couldn't* sell it, even if they would want to (which they probably would).

They probably can't even use it as security for a loan, since it's not their property.

The only way they can get *any* kind of return of their investments, is from sales of individual copies of the OS, which is now tied to the sales of Sam460 and the "x1000". Sales that will be counted in the lower end of 2-3 figures.

Anyway, we aren't talking about a lot of money here...

Amiga Inc. has the Amiga trademark to license. Probably they also consider this advantageous, we'll see how good this turns out. They are not allowed to compete with AmigaOS 4 and beyond though.

Amiga Inc still owns and controls *all relevant* (in 2011) IP. The way I see it, they aren't the losers in the deal.

If licensees like Commodore will actually score by hitting some real market, they (the Amiga IP owners) can make good money in royalties!