Who owns Amiga Intellectual Property

[STUser]

Made you look!   ;-)

So what's the real story?  Who owns the remnants of Amiga (which are the remnants of Escom, which are the remnants of Commodore)?

Edited by Argo: Changed the topic.

[Rodney]

Well, Amino.. that is, bill mcwean i would have thought. Amiga Inc still own the remains of commodore.

[Monoxyde]

STUser wrote:
Made you look!   ;-)

So what's the real story?  Who owns the remnants of Amiga (which are the remnants of Escom, which are the remnants of Commodore)?

You bastard! :-P

As for the remnants, I'm not sure if even AInc knows...

[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:.

[STUser]

If someone wanted to build an Amiga computer under licence, who would he go to?

[T_Bone]

STUser wrote:
If someone wanted to build an Amiga computer under licence, who would he go to?

Whoever has the license

[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 ;-)

[STUser]

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

[T_Bone]

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

I'm a little fuzzy who owns the actual chipsets, Amiga Inc own the trademarks, and either own AmigaOS or own the licensing rights. Anything Amiga that Amiga Inc don't own Gateway does.

[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? :-)

[Step]

Gateway has held on to some of the patents, as for the rest only Gateway/Amiga knows for sure. Amiga has either licenced or bought the rest and we dont know exactly what.

[STUser]

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

So no backward compatibility with any old Amiga applications?  No common hardware?  A totally new OS?

Isn't this the equivalent of "Amiga" selling a rebranded e-Machines Wintel Box with XP and UAE and calling it an "Amiga"?

What do you Amiga folk think of this?  What keeps you with Amiga if they're making completely incompatible hardware and software?  What makes an Amiga an Amiga?

[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 :-).

[STUser]

So why not just buy a Linux system with UAE?  If the OS, architecture and everything else is different, what's the point?

I guess I am just confused.   :-D

[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?).