Who owns Amiga Intellectual Property

[odin]

Long version: Check this

Short version:

Tulip bought the Commodore remnents and never did anything with it (up to this day). Gateway bought the Amiga related stuff and never did anything with it. In 2000 a bunch of Amiga-fans (or something) bought (licenced?) the Amiga stuff from Gateway and tried to make a write-once-run-anywhere environment with the Amiga logo on it.

They failed utterly and are now hanging on to survive. Meanwhile this company (Amiga Inc) licenced Hyperion Entertainment to produce a PPC version of the AmigaOS. This is to run on PPC boards for Amiga 1200's/4000's and PPC-ATX motherboards called 'AmigaONE' produced by Eyetech (or produced by Mai, but I don't wanna go into that dunghole right now :-)).

And then there is the Pegasos, an ATX-PPC motherboard produced by Genesi which runs an os called 'MorphOS' which has AmigaOS 3.x 68k CPU compatibility.

Basically there are two camps bashing each other to death nowadays. Amiga Inc (the 'red' camp) supporters and Genesi/Pegasos/MorphOS (the 'blue' camp) supporters.

Ofcourse there's also AROS, Amithlon, UAE.

One thing's for sure, Amigaland hasn't become a simpler world since the big C= died :crazy:.

[odin]

Er......only a very smart lawyer would know for sure......but I guess Amiga Inc. Though Gateway still owns all intellectual property and Amiga Inc is licensing it. Or something.

Problem in Amigaland is that there are a lot of people claiming various things and saying a lot of contradictionary things. There's not a lot that's certain....

Soap-opera writers could learn a great deal from all this ;-)

[odin]

STUser wrote:

whoever has the licence

So then it's not clear who owns the IP, such as AGA, the real Amiga OS (3.x), Workbench, etc.?
How are new machines coming to market then? :-o

Well, the new Amiga branded PPC boards have nothing in common (sp) with the old 68k hardware.

Aside from that AInc has a licence to use the Amiga IP/trademarks. So I guess AInc can relicense these.

Help? Someone? :-)

[odin]

Actually OS4 will have an 68k emulator to allow 68k OS-friendly programs (those that will run RTG screens while leaving Workbench mulitasking) to run on PPC CPU's. This excludes 99% of the games.

And yes selling the Amiga1 PPC boards with an Amiga brand is a very touchy point with a lot of folks :-).

[odin]

The point is progress and geekiness, young lad ;-). Same reason why someone would buy a Pegasos, the new Acorn RiscOS machine or even a Medusa (or what were the names of those Atari-clones?).