In the Amiga community they are definitely mixed views towards Cloanto. With two destinct sides. After reading all of the views given by many members of the different forums in the Amiga community, this is a compilation of the views I've found so far.
If you don't know who Cloanto are, they are the Italian company who develop and sell the Amiga Forever And C64 Forever CD/DVD packages.
Many true Amiga enthusiasts within the Amiga community dislike Cloanto and the Amiga Forever Package. Whereas fans of the Amiga who left the scene and have since been looking for a way to enjoy some of what the Amiga had find Amiga Forever and love it.
Casual fans of the Amiga, who owned an Amiga back in the late 80's, but then got rid of it and moved on, tend to like Amiga Forever. It is an all in one package that allows easy emulation of an Amiga using the Cloanto player frontend. With full setups of the main machines from back in the day, and a selection of games and demos to run out of the box. For them it is ideal as they don't need to try and work out WinUAE or scratch their heads as to what the Kickstart roms are.
However...
For the real Amiga enthusiasts the reasons many Amiga Forever are common. The most stated reason is that the underlying workings of the package are based heavily on freeware or public domain software, developed for years for free by their developers purely for fun to give to the community. But Cloanto are using these software pacakges to make money. In many peoples view this is morally wrong and it goes against the community.
The biggest two issues raised as arguments against Amiga Forever are WinUAE and the Kickstart roms.
Firstly without WinUAE Amiga Forever would not exist. It is the core software the runs the whole package. For many they view this as just being wrong; that someone is making money off the back of this. And no one is sure if Toni Wilen is getting anything for this, apart from a credit in the Amiga Forever documentation.
The second is the kickstart roms. We have all known for years how Cloanto protect their claim over the Kickstart roms and send emails to any site hosting or providing links to a kickstart rom file. However many have recently been questioning what the license actually is that Cloanto hold for the rights to the Kickstart roms. And the interesting thing is that no one can find out any information about this. Their "custom" version of the roms was examined by members of EAB and it was discovered that all they had altered to make them so called custom and unique to Cloanto was the first 3 character at the front of each rom file.
So do Cloanto really own the rights to sell the Kickstart rom images? No one knows, but we all know that real Amiga enthusiasts all agree that all Kickstart roms (at least up to 3.0) should now be made freeware for all to use. There is just no valid reason for holding them as a copyrighted license any more. Especially when you think about it and realise that the only people still making any money from the Kickstart 1.3 rom is Cloanto!!!
So do you agree with the current situation with the Kickstart roms? Or would you like to see them made freeware?
Another issue many have is the need to buy the Premium Edition of Amiga Forever to get hold of the Amiga related Videos. These videos were filmed by Commodore employees for Amiga fans to watch, and in reality should be made freely available, not exclusively sold by Cloanto at a price!
There are however some points about Amiga Forever that are unique, and Cloanto should be given the recognition they deserve for these.
The KS Light OS. Based on Linux and UAE, it has been developed well to boot directly from CD into a fully configured Amiga OS, and also now able to be installed to HDD. However Linux and UAE are both open source/freeware software so the argument about selling this is still there.
The next is the Amiga Explorer. This has always been a unique and very useful product that does deserve to be purchases. Allowing people to connect their PC to an Amiga via Null Modem or Ethernet and transfer ADFs directly to a floppy disc in the Amiga's drive. This package can be bought separately from Amiga Forever though, so can be argued as being good in its own right and not because it is a part of Amiga Forever.
Finally we have the Amiga Forever Front end player for WinUAE. This is quite a nice idea for a Front end, first seen in the last release. It was buggy and not that user friendly before, but the new updates sound like they have improved it. However should a front end for a free emulator be commercial and cost money? Not in my view. Again it goes against the retro emulation community in my view.
So what are your thought about Cloanto and Amiga Forever? Are you for or against the package and what it contains as a commercial product?
And what about C64 Forever? That uses the same front end, but everything else it includes is completely freeware, even the C64 roms. So in my view that is wrong.
I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this after reading and compiling this post based on points of view already raised within the rest of the Amiga community.