Commodore UNIX, some questions

[nicholas]

Ownership of the product has changed several times, too, which complicated things enormously.

Back when I was doing consulting work for Amiga Technologies GmbH we made an effort to obtain the Amiga Unix source code (which was not available among the assets acquired by ESCOM). It could have been useful

Searching through the available debris, I figured that it might be possible to contact the Amiga Unix authors who had ported the AT&T code to the Amiga, and written the Amiga-specific drivers. It turned out that one of these authors was still around, did respond to e-mail and was willing to help. The big catch was that for legal reasons he had to make sure that Amiga Technologies GmbH actually was legally entitled to receive the source code in question. This turned out to be practically impossible to prove, due to the big ball of mess that was the Commodore asset acquisition by ESCOM.

I am no lawyer, but wouldn't the copyright return to the programmer once the company he wrote the software for went bankrupt? Especially since no one else bought the rights to it.

This is how many 80's games have been re-released recently.

[nicholas]

Amiga Unix shipped with the source code to the Amiga-specific bits, and as far as I know these were never ever lost. You could rebuild the kernel, for example, changing the Amiga-specific code, but the portions which were not Amiga-specific were provided as object files in binary form only.

The portion we were after was the AT&T System V Release 4 source code itself, including Amiga-platform specific patches. In a nutshell, we would have liked to be able to rebuild the entire Amiga Unix kernel, userland files and everything, and turn Amiga Unix back into a commercial product.

Problem was, this wasn't a 1980'ies game, but some serious, very expensive code base which was valued north of US$ 500,000 at the time.

Well, it probably was a pipe dream to be able to upgrade the kernel code (support the 68040, support more peripherals such as DAT drives, for example). But we tried anyway, and we failed

But, thankfully, NetBSD finally came around at the time when we tried to revive Amiga Unix. It would have been very difficult to revive Amiga Unix, get it back into shape, since it was completely closed source. Given the state of the Amiga market at the time, I doubt that enough customers would have been willing to pay for upgrades (especially since Commodore did their best to burn any bridges it may have still had to the Amiga Unix user community).

I see, thanks for the details, it's a very interesting story.

Have you ever thought about writing an historical book about your experiences? I'd buy it, in fact I'd even pay for a pre-order!