The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is going on right now, but unless you’re interested in Samsung or LG smart fridges, generic smartphones from generic vendors, or smartwatches nobody will remember or care about two weeks from now, it’s kind of hard to find decent news among the cavalcade of irrelevance.
Well, there’s this – an official statement from Hyperion, the developer of AmigaOS 4, regarding the source code leak late last year.
The days between last Christmas and New Year were actually clouded by the sad fact that the source code of AmigaOS 3.1 and additional content dating back to 1994 was published and widely spread without permission of the rights-holder. Note that no code of AmigaOS 4.x was released or distributed.
[…]
While this would be already more than enough of a reason to care about the unauthorised disclosure and distribution, it is also the very same settlement agreement which made all of this possible in the first place, which contractually requires Hyperion to enforce and protect any intellectual property rights associated with AmigaOS including the AmigaOS 3.1 source-code.
So yeah, Hyperion is obligated to combat this source code leak, but as we all know – this is the internet. It’s out there now, and it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
hahah best summary ever! ROFL remember when the CES was fun? xD
I think the last interesting one was CES 2006 or 2007 when the HD-DVD and Blu-ray were announced…
Well, not this year, I’m looking forward Intel’s presentation, I worked on one of their product
Don’t forget relaunching vintage vinyl turntables.
http://gizmodo.com/the-technics-1200-turntable-is-back-1751157898
Seriously, there is no point spending legal fees defending this copyright but if you don’t keep planting your flag you lose the right to ever protect it in the off chance there is some IP that might be worth something.
I don’t know about other nations with regard to copyright, but that’s a myth in the US system. Copyright holders are under no obligation to fight every possible infringement or lose the right to protect it. They can selectively enforce their rights, recognize clear or likely prospects of fair use, and encourage (licensed or “nod & wink”) fan initiated works and still retain all the rights to enforce their copyrights in court should something egregious arise.
Example: CBS, and rights holders before it, has long tolerated and encouraged noncommercial fan created works based on the Star Trek universe. It’s created a loyal fan base and expanded and created a very rich and diverse community. However, that does not stop CBS from pursuing commercial infringement of their rights to Star Trek, related marks, etc. They are entirely within their rights on what and how to administer their rights in any way they wish inside the parameters of US copyright law. Under which, not to pursue is as much a right as pursuit.
Hi,
I think it’s more likely a mistake than a myth, caused by people getting trademarks confused with copyrights.
– Brendan
If someone ported it to the Atari ST(e)/TT/Falcon.
Honestly, who is the source code useful to? Maybe some academic research, the AROS/MorphOS guys probably can’t touch it for fear of lawsuit, though they could use it to help reverse engineer things. I believe 3.1 was only ever m68k, so no PPC support, which is what 3.9 and 4.x added. Personally I think this is great though, since it could be considered a work of art in some circles and should be preserved, and now it is.
It’s like the rare release of something like Star Raiders II for the Atari 8bit, lost gem due to the Last Star Fighter game that was renamed. Now preserved and restored due to the Internet. Granted, this is one of the pro pirate arguments, but I think it fits.
Well, if Hyperion managed to ‘leak’ more binary releases, maybe they might not be in the situation they are now. Perhaps the sources will offspring more forks. And no, leave the Atari lines of computer in their niche, they stalled for far too long.
The leaked source code is useless for anything else than reading it for fun. It’s relevant like source code for C64 ROM or your garden variety PC BIOS nowadays – nothing useful can be derived from these.
Edited 2016-01-06 06:33 UTC
Well, availability of the source code is an excellent opportunity to find possible exploits (and if it’s old code written when security was not a primary OS concern, even better).
There are not that many AmigaOS boxes on the wild internet but some are.
No one. Because if anyone working on Morph OS or AROS looks at the code, there is a real issues with them ever working on either of those projects codebases ever again.
Look at what happened with the BeOS code leak. There was a build made for PowerPC, and that is about it. No one** dared do anything else with it because no one wanted lawyers profiting from their hard work at maintaining the source and improving the OS.
** Okay – Zeta and YellowTab. But they pretty much just did whatever they liked with the OS with little regard for the legacy and “lied” about where they got the source from. Ultimately, all that they did was wasted effort as it imploded when Access threatened them with litigation.
Edited 2016-01-06 10:17 UTC
You have no idea what you are talking about, yellowTab had a time limited redistribution agreement with Be.Inc for 5.1 that did NOT carry over to Palm (hence the lawsuit) after the sale of Be. Inc to Palm (actually PalmOne, and later ACCESS corp) This is easily researched by readin Bernd Korz vs ACCESS Corp transcripts readily available from the german court system on request (sadly, no online sources are available)
Edited 2016-01-06 12:03 UTC
For more info, ask Bernd or Trevor. Btw the lawsuit ended in a settlement and not a conviction, it did result in a cease and desist and profit sharing from previously sold copies. But if there was any actual criminal intent or action there would have been fines and/or siezures.
I never mentioned what did or did not happen in the end of any legal proceedings. All I said was Access threatened them with litigation. And that they stopped all work, and the changes they made were a dead end because of this… All of these statements are true. The facts are that their legal position was dubious, they were taken to court, they stopped developing Zeta – anything else is out of the scope of my statement.
But not for the source code. They never had any entitlement to use the source to alter the OS. Access went on record saying as much here on OS News for example. They certainly had the source code. A lot of what they did was impossible without it. Plus, I’ve seen the source code – it exists. Here is the PowerPC version of BeOS post R5.03, built from source, in action… (look at the build date in the about box when it pops up briefly.)
https://youtu.be/YQvhnVNcTWs?t=497
A friend threw this up ages ago, it’s pretty poor, but it demonstrates it running at least.
whom*
AmigaOS is a graphical multitasking OS working with 1 MegaByte (not Giga!) of RAM. Maybe the leaked sources should inspire the developers of the more current and widespread OSes. In Windows 7 i managed to consume up to 10 GB of Ram without even starting Eclipse or a VM. Even Skype consumes 130MB of RAM. I’m a java developer and cant buy a machine below 16GB these days, crazy!
I don’t think you really can use it for much. You can be inspired by the way AmigaOS works, but the source code is a remnant of hurried 80s and early 90s programming and it’s all tied to the Amiga hardware.
Some of the core developers had a lot of regrets about how it turned out, because there wasn’t enough time to work on it.
I understand your frustration, but modern OSes offers many up to date services and device support that both Amiga and Atari didn’t need at their time, since the hardware was not expandable.
If you really crave for such things, get a Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspian, or Linux Xfce for x86, there you’ll get something as close as possible to your dream system.
If you’re into the hardcore of things, try this : http://janos.io/
You can pay extra $1,000,000 to developers and waste years of time for fragile “optimizations” which will usually produce non-portable, unreadable and unmaintainable code, because of too many fixed assumptions and then collapse into dust when someone tries to include new features into the product or even modify existing code. In this time your competitors will be already working on another product. … or you can buy 16GB worth of RAM for $600 and don’t care that Skype uses 200MB instead of 100MB of RAM because of bitmap cache instead of drawing user interface from hard-coded list of draw commands.
Edited 2016-01-06 22:08 UTC
Okay, so Hyperion has had some .. interesting history and issues the last few years that have some Amiga people up in arms, some people meh’ing and others like me hoping it passes quickly and gets back on track.
Okay, the code is out there. It’s not huge amounts of usefulness. It’s old. It’s got attention. People are in a tizzy.. right, okay I have an idea Hyperion.
Why not .. scrub the code. Put it out as a “antique version” and restrict it’s sale.. lock it down legally. Get people to play with it, build it.. port it. But if they want to use a more modern version, get AmigaOS4.x and modern hardware. Why not use it as a teaser to get interest and keep the retroleum fans happy? Maybe make it a regular thing.. every year.. update the code as a moving target for say current date -20 years?
Maybe even people can buy a 15-20$ hobbyist license to go hack-fu on it, redist with no media or profit?
all sorts of ideas. Commentards.. please elaborate on the idea
At least this wouldn’t threaten current day sales of AmigaOS4.x
It didn’t for me. I’ve got two legal copies.
<3
Not a lot of things in the Amiga community make sense…
Paying expensive lawyers to go after the leaked 3.1 source code is a monumental waste of money, the source isn’t of any use nor commercial value, even if you could get it to build you’d have an extremely outdated system. You’d be better off building AROS which is already free and open source.
Open sourcing the 3.1 code or at the very least not caring about it at all would be a far better course of action. Various old apps and systems have been open sourced over the years and they only serve as educational reference material, noone is going to compile and use an ancient unix when they can get modern usable bsd or linux.
Hyperion would be better served porting amigaos 4.x to a platform thats affordable and widely available, many more people would try it out if it didn’t have such a high barrier of entry and this would result in more users, more third party software being developed etc.
AmigaOS is never going to be a major player anymore, but it could have a much bigger niche hobbyist community than it does now.
I’m in no way a Hyperion lover, but I’m getting sick and tired that people seems to assume they do what they do out of spite.
Look, HE is a tiny company that makes less money than a mobile hot dog stand while trying to make something as complex as an operating system. Yes, they would get more users by going x86 but hey, surprise surprise, they know this already! The reason why they don’t is because they don’t have the resources for it. Not by a long shot. This is not likely to change or improve. They are already swamped with work getting this darn OS to just work properly!
So my suggestion is that you either contact them and offer them 30 million dollars for an x86 port, or just, you know, stop stating the obvious and stop this to death nagged about topic.
Rather than Hyperion spending their money fighting over something only of interest to diehard fans, maybe they could give the community a chance to crowdfund a majority stake in the OS, with the intention to open source it.
Edited 2016-01-06 23:25 UTC
They _can’t_ because of their contract with Amiga Inc. and Cloanto. This is well known by now. Even if Amiga Inc. don’t care anymore Cloanto sure does as their whole business model is now dependent of them owning the OS.
If it’s open source you want, go with AROS. It’s pretty close to actually working on 68k Amigas and mostly need bug fixes and optimization.
But wait, this fact hasn’t helped AROS at all. There is still no influx of developers making this an awesome Workbench replacement in 2 weeks. Progress is still as slow as ever.
This is because open source is by no means a cure-for-all. Someone still has to do the coding (for free) and interests in doing that isn’t that high. Simple as that. So by all probability even if AOS 3.1 was open sourced it would get 2 months of buzz and then people would complain about lack of progress here as well.
Meh, it’s hard to have any sympathy for any of the current (and past) commercial holders of Amiga’s IP, given how they have squandered and mismanaged the platform.
Besides. This is 20+ year old code. It is ancient, and nobody is doing anything with it. From a purely archival perspective, this is the best thing that could have happened to this codebase.