Hyperion Entertainment CVBA and Amiga Inc. reach settlement!

Hyperion Entertainment CVBA and Amiga Inc. reach settlement

Brussels, Belgium – October 17, 2009

Hyperion Entertainment CVBA is pleased to announce that on September 30, 2009, it has reached a comprehensive settlement agreement with Amiga, Inc., Itec LLC and Amino Development Corporation, Inc., to bring all ongoing litigation and worldwide pending procedures between the parties to an end.
As part of the settlement agreement, the Amiga Parties acknowledge that Hyperion is the sole owner of AmigaOS 4 without prejudice to any third party rights.


Within the framework of the settlement agreement Hyperion is granted an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide right to AmigaOS 3.1 in order to use, develop, modify, commercialize, distribute and market AmigaOS 4.x (and subsequent versions of AmigaOS including without limitation AmigaOS 5) in any form, on any medium and for any current or future hardware platform under the exclusive trademark “AmigaOS” (Amiga operating system) and using other associated trademarks (such as the “BoingBall” logo).


Hyperion will continue development and distribution of AmigaOS 4.x (and beyond) as it has done since November of 2001.


We wish to thank our loyal customers who have supported us throughout the judicial procedures and especially the AmigaOS 4.x development team for their continued efforts and at the request of whom this official announcement was made.


As Hyperion Entertainment’s most ambitious project to date is drawing to a close in collaboration with our partners, we invite our current and prospective customers to watch this space for further updates on Hyperion’s continued efforts to revive the Amiga platform.

http://os4.hyperion-entertainment.biz/

The news above comes from the website of Hyperion

That is some great news. This was the main reason for holding development of the OS back.

Lets hope now that they have the freedom to develop the OS into the future in any direction, and on any platform, that they finally start to consider more mainstream and cheaper hardware solutions to migrate the OS to, as I think PPC has run its course due to this CPU no longer being developed for desktop computing. Custom motherboards with PPC for Amiga OS 4 are just too expensive. Look at how much the SAM boards are selling for.

I can understand reasons for not wanting to port to x86 as it would easily be pirated with easy access to hardware that could run an OS; and also there are so many variations in hardware configuration that there is no way to predict what the OS will find on instillation. Therefore a platform designed specifically for Amiga OS is a logical one to stop the OS being pirated, and to know exactly what hardware it will be installed on. And after reading a lot about upcoming CPUs I think they should look at RISC based ARM processors. They would not be that different to the current PPC architecture, compared to x86, and the big difference is that ARM are about to launch a netbook based ARM processor to compete with the Atom and that would be a great light weight, but potentially quite powerful CPU to look at.

Sounds like good news, but I am a bit fuzzy on the specifics here.. Since I am not familiar with all the ins and outs of the Amiga legal issues, how does this change anything? (I ask simply because during all of this AmigaOS has progressed from 3.1 to 3.5 to 4.9 and then 4.0 through 4.2) To me it appears that they have progressed nicely albeit a bit slower than we would all like!

How does this settlement change the landscape for the Amiga and future development?

And please forgive my ignorance! I am not trying to start anything, I am truly looking for some clarification...

I don't know that much about the actual legal aspects of the whole case, so hopefully someone else can go into a bit more detail. However, it all surrounded who owned the rights to each part of the Amiga. The Amiga OS, the Kickstart 3.1 rom code, the Amiga name etc... Amiga OS 4 started to be developed many years ago, but was held up badly by the different companies arguing over these rights.

OS4 is a nice OS, but it isn't that much of a step forward from Workbench 3.1 really. And look how long it has been since 3.1 came out! Compare that to how far other OSs like Windows and MacOS have developed in the same period of time. These legal issues have really hurt the Amiga OS badly.

This drawn out dispute has also in my view been the only reason for the OS sticking to the out of date and now very expensive PPC CPU as the platform of choice. Now that Apple have abandoned this CPU family in favour of Intel, PPC isn't being developed for desktop use at all, so it is a dead technology for the future.

We have no idea what direction Amiga OS will take now this is all resolved, but my hope is that they will now finally reassess the hardware it is being run on, and finally realise that PPC is dead and they need to migrate and move on with a different platform.

Intel for me is the best as it offers the cheapest hardware to build an Amiga OS box and hardware such as the Catweasel to utilise for backwards Workbench compatibility. It would be the perfect platform, all be it with the issues of piracy to deal with.