Isn't it time for some Amiga software to become Public Domain

[jsixis]

The only software that truly needs to become public domain is 68k AmigaOS itself.

yes that would have been nice back in the 90's when Gateway screwed everyone

[Pentad]

I would like to add to this discussion for a number of reasons...


If you have read any of my other posts you know that I teach copyright and patent laws (just the basics, I'm not an attorney or anything) and I DO believe that the laws are broken.   I'm not sure we can fix them given the powers that be.

However, my concern is the preservation of software for history...for the future.  I'm not talking about just having an ADF image of Deluxe Paint but what about the source code?   It would be nice for many of these programs and their source code to be archived some place safe.  

I believe people should be paid for their work and I understand the purpose for copyright and patents but I also think they need to adapt for the digital world we live in.   I'm sure we've lost a great deal of source code to some awesome applications, games, and even operating systems (AMIX comes to mind...).

I'm a supporter of putting knowledge back into society.   If its not making money for someone, if its been abandoned, if no further development is planned, why not put the source code out there for others to read, study, and learn from.   You have no idea who is going to read it and what it might inspire them to do?  

There was a push to have MacPaint's source code released so people could see how such a program written in Pascal (and 68kasm) could really function in 128k of memory.  Bill Atkinson had a hard time finding a copy of the source code and this was only 20 years after it came out...

One last thing...   I see many students show up and laugh when I tell them my first computer had 64k (well 48k really -C64) and I did OS work on an OS that was less than 1 meg (AmigaOS).   Now, I mean they laugh but they are really very skeptical that you could write anything useful in that kind of space.  They truly don't really understand working in that kind of environment.  So, seeing this source code, working with programs like this, I do believe it has educational value.

Cheers!
-P

[Pyromania]

@cecilia

When not just get the CD version of Deluxe Paint V? More goodies on that version.

[Amiga_Nut]

Microsoft might have a thing or two to say about that.   (o:

In reality (figuratively speaking)I think a lot of it is already ?  True ?

No, try searching for Vista Pro 4 for PC and you will find many people selling you the program not giving it away despite its age.

As to the thread title, the first thing that needs to happen is for companies like Cloanto to disappear instantly, and Kickstart and Workbench 1.0 to 3.1 to become freeware and public domain.

I fail to see the point of Amiga Forever and copyright lawyers now that Amiga Inc has disappeared down a black hole. For god's sake let the retro community have what it deserves, FREE UNENCUMBERED EMULATION. For 25+ years it has been us not Commodore/Escom/Gateway/Hyperion/Amiga Inc/Cloanto who have sold more Amigas and kept a dead machine alive and well for a quarter of a century NOT them.

Instead we get slapped in the face by fools like Cloanto breaking functionality and versatility of UAE (why did they allow Cloanto to use it? idiot programmers!) to enforce rip-off pricing of AF, and totally redundant overpriced old technology paperweights like x1000 as our 'saviour'.

Some people even think Amiga Forever is a good thing for us LOL.

[Pyromania]

I would like to add to this discussion for a number of reasons...


If you have read any of my other posts you know that I teach copyright and patent laws (just the basics, I'm not an attorney or anything) and I DO believe that the laws are broken.   I'm not sure we can fix them given the powers that be.

However, my concern is the preservation of software for history...for the future.  I'm not talking about just having an ADF image of Deluxe Paint but what about the source code?   It would be nice for many of these programs and their source code to be archived some place safe.  

I believe people should be paid for their work and I understand the purpose for copyright and patents but I also think they need to adapt for the digital world we live in.   I'm sure we've lost a great deal of source code to some awesome applications, games, and even operating systems (AMIX comes to mind...).

I'm a supporter of putting knowledge back into society.   If its not making money for someone, if its been abandoned, if no further development is planned, why not put the source code out there for others to read, study, and learn from.   You have no idea who is going to read it and what it might inspire them to do?  

There was a push to have MacPaint's source code released so people could see how such a program written in Pascal (and 68kasm) could really function in 128k of memory.  Bill Atkinson had a hard time finding a copy of the source code and this was only 20 years after it came out...

One last thing...   I see many students show up and laugh when I tell them my first computer had 64k (well 48k really -C64) and I did OS work on an OS that was less than 1 meg (AmigaOS).   Now, I mean they laugh but they are really very skeptical that you could write anything useful in that kind of space.  They truly don't really understand working in that kind of environment.  So, seeing this source code, working with programs like this, I do believe it has educational value.

Cheers!
-P

This is why I worked so hard for years to get the source code to the Amiga Video Toaster Flyer. It too was almost lost. It lives today @

http://www.openvideotoaster.org


Maybe people don't appricate it now but it was not an easy feat to get it!

[kolla]

O.K. - I try to explain:

- DynaCadd is the best CAD application the Amiga ever had. It is the only one on the Amiga capable of real 3d mode, AFAIK. DynaCadd
 
- CNCTool is a tool to convert data from e.g. DynaCadd's 3d part drawings into CNC files (for lathing, milling, drilling)

- MathAmation (incl. all modules) by Progressive Peripherals was an advanced math program and function plotter with modules for mechanical engineering, physics, electric engineering, mercantile calculations, ...  MathAmation


- NewIO is a PCB layout program with autorouting feature.  NewIO 3.5 - page 3 - sorry - German only

- about LogicWorks - an early version of it was available for the Amiga back in the late 80s/early 90s.

- Digital Workbench was a program to develop digital schematics

- A&O v3.1, AmiGAL v1.0, AmiBURN v1.0, L100, ProNET / ProBOARD 2.0a and PLP V.2 by Maxon were all programs for the Amiga to design electronics. Described here in an "Amiga Spezial" training course of 1993 (page 3 onwards) - sorry - German only.

This posting illustrates nicely why I dropped UK amiga magazines for German ones - UK mags were expencive, 50% ads, 40% games, 5% reader letters and maybe 5% utility software. German mags on the other hand were thinner, cheaper (a year abo for the price of two UK mags), not that many ads,  some game reviews, but alot about utility software and courses. I got the impression that in UK amigas were only game machines, while in Germany they were actually used as computers

[mbrantley]

Why do you need new copies? Where are your backups?



So fix the laws.

Great if you bought the software when it was for sale. But if it's unavailable, what's a potentional new user of an old program to do?

[B00tDisk]

No, try searching for Vista Pro 4 for PC and you will find many people selling you the program not giving it away despite its age.

That's because VistaPro is under at least semi-active development on the PC.  Back in... '04? ish?  or thereabouts I asked the developer if he'd consider rejoining the Amiga market with future versions and he said he'd definitely be interested if the userbase was there.

So, at least on the vistapro front... y' never know.

Now as far as EA and Dpaint goes?  Yeah they can go take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut, find a torrent, grab it there.

[mbrantley]

That's because VistaPro is under at least semi-active development on the PC.  Back in... '04? ish?  or thereabouts I asked the developer if he'd consider rejoining the Amiga market with future versions and he said he'd definitely be interested if the userbase was there.

So, at least on the vistapro front... y' never know.

I'd love a new VistaPro for AOS4. Even though VP has been greatly outclassed by scenery generating 3D programs on the other platforms, it can still be a lot of fun. I purchased the old VistaPro and the MakePath addon program for the 68K Amiga back in the day, and I still fire them up from time to time.

[AndreasM]

NewIO

can you download on the Amiga Future Webpage

[whiteb]

can you download on the Amiga Future Webpage

You can also thank ^^^^ this poster for delaying, what was THEN the impending release of PFS to Public Domain via Aminet.

[PanterHZ]

There is one thing I think will be problematic with at least some software becoming public domain and that is when the programs uses technology that originally was licenced from third party developers who may still have the copyright to their stuff.
One good example of this is Personal Paint, because when Cloanto decided to make their program free, they had to remove the GIF save support first since it was licensed.
In Cloantos case this was not a major issue, but with software where fundamental parts originally were licensed from third parties, it may not be as easy to make them public domain, and opensourcing them might even be worse.

[klx300r]

DynaCadd 3 from CRP Koruk
CNCTool to convert data from DynaCadd's 3d parts into CNC files (lathing, milling, drilling)

where can I get/buy DynaCadd as it looks like I can use it for my work..all I need is a simple 2D program that can import/erxport dxf files

[vidarh]

It seems so much of the focus here is on commercial programs. But what about Aminet?

I've been working to catalogue as much source as I could find for interesting old software, but the thing that strikes me is that there's *so much software* out there that may not always be all that great by modern standards but that still contains nuggets that are of value and that can be reused/repurposed. A lot of it was released as freeware or public domain or shareware, but with no source made available.

Never mind the commercial apps - we've also "lost" tens of thousands of programs that the original authors didn't ever have any intentions of making money off. Not in the sense that they're not available anymore, but in the sense that no further improvements, bug fixes or ports (whether to AOS4, AROS or MOS) are possible without large efforts disassembling/reverse engineering them or "cloning" them from scratch.

I've toyed with the idea of making an effort to track down and contact more authors to ask if they'd consider digging out the source, but it's a lot of work and I already have my hands full with porting projects (working on an AROS port of FrexxEd, and hope to get it running on AOS4 afterwards; halfway through making ACE Basic ready to support multiple CPU backends - in both cases source was thankfully released before the authors left the Amiga scene)

It'd be great to see a project to gather a list of programs to target - commercial too, but public domain / freeware would be easier targets - and information about the authors, and then have people cooperate to track them down and try to convince them to release source.

This'd be a great project to get involved in for someone that aren't developers themselves but want to contribute to the community - it takes mainly persistence in tracking down people and convincing them to put in the effort to find their old code.

If anyone wants to work on that, I'd be happy to provide space on my wiki or set up a separate wiki for it or whatever (PM me if you want to make sure I see it if anyone wants to take me up on that), as well as help at least bring any source "extracted" from people into an initial compilable state where possible. I have too much on to be able to commit to much more than that at present, though.

[Franko]

I have spent years disassembling many old software titles and re-writing, optimizing and re-asembling them in 68k to work with my various Amiga set ups.

While it would be nice to see much of the original source code for old software open sourced, the main problem is most authors source code (including mine) are much varied in the way the are written and sometimes even with notes, they are not very clear or easy to understand and work out without a hell of a lot of effort.This applies mainly to source code written in C.

I have found that the best way to update old software is to disassemble it into 68k and then sit down and study it, then re-write, modify, optimize and/or add new features that suits my own needs.

This is especially true for software that was originally written in C (yuk) as the optimizations achieved in size of the code can be as much as 40% and in speed as much as around 30%.

I can guarantee that I use personally on my system lots of programs that the Amiga community uses, that have new features/improvements are highly optimized, bug fixed and are generally much more improved than the original.

Even after all this time where a piece of software is no longer making money for a company or the author & due to the grey & murky issues of copyright/ownership, their is tons of software just sitting out their fading away into obscurity because it's no longer supported or just forgotten about by the original authors.

This is a great shame as I have many old programs running that I have improved and which only I get to use because of the lack of interest by whomever own the copyright for them.

The companies/authors that hold onto this software have nothing to lose by open sourcing old Amiga programs, they no longer make money on them and probably never will now, but for whatever reasons they have for not allowing the Amiga community access to improve or update this software I don't understand and never will.

A lot of these companies & authors seem to forget that it was the Amiga that gave them their start in the industry, so what loss would it be for them to give back something to the folk who shelled out their cash in the first place to start them on their way.

[vidarh]

I have found that the best way to update old software is to disassemble it into 68k and then sit down and study it, then re-write, modify, optimize and/or add new features that suits my own needs.

If that works for you, then that's great, but it's pretty much useless for people who'd want native PPC versions or want to use them on AROS, for example. And most people write asm much slower than C.

Personally I find updating C versions to be quite simple and straight forward - most of the changes that needs to be done are relatively simple. Even moving old Amiga C programs to AROS on x86 is usually quite easy despite having to deal with endianness issues, asm (e.g. I'm working on porting FrexxEd, and while the largest batch of work was simply getting it to compile cleanly on modern compilers, there was also snippets of inline asm etc.) and the occasional missing feature or API incompatibility.

This is especially true for software that was originally written in C (yuk) as the optimizations achieved in size of the code can be as much as 40% and in speed as much as around 30%.

With old programs compiled with SAS/Lattice or StormC etc., I don't doubt this - I did the whole disassemble and optimize bit with a few programs back in the day too, and for those compilers you often end up deleting most lines of a program due to horrendously bad register allocation which leads to massive amount of unnecessary stack usage for example.

With programs compiled with relatively recent versions of gcc, on the other hand, the margins are much, much smaller. A recompile (when the C source is available) is a far more efficient use of time to optimize most programs, though. If you then want to disassemble and optimize further, you'll still save a massive amount of time by having a better starting point.

The companies/authors that hold onto this software have nothing to lose by open sourcing old Amiga programs, they no longer make money on them and probably never will now, but for whatever reasons they have for not allowing the Amiga community access to improve or update this software I don't understand and never will.

A lot of the time I don't think it's down to not being willing to, but simply that nobody has asked or pushed them enough to put in the effort to dig out the old source. We'd get a ton of source if enough time was just spent tracking down authors and asking.