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Thanks for supplying that bit of info, as it is probably important for understanding what was presented, and how Amiga Inc. thought about it as a possible continuation of AmigaOS.

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That doesn't make sense, unless the information I have heard or read is incorrect. What I and others have heard or read is that McBill & Amiga Inc., wanted control of MorphOS, after it would be renamed AmigaOS4. Surely he could not expect to obtain control of MorphOS/AmigaOS4 without paying for it, and using the sales revenue to continue developing it into the future. If the discussions never mentioned any payment from Amiga Inc. to Ralph Schmidt & the rest of the MorphOS Dev. Team members, and as you wrote, the discussion was about Ralph and the MorphOS Dev. Team members being granted a license to use the name AmigaOS4, plus perhaps also a license for the desktop name of Workbench (and I assume the use of all AmigaOS3.x source code, to assist in making MorphOS behave more like 3.1, or 3.9, on a fast Commodore Amiga computer with accelerator, except faster and with some new features). It would seem very strange to me if Amiga Inc. and McBill were trying to charge the MorphOS team a license fee for the name and maybe using any of the source code, but maybe it could have worked, if there were little or no money required to be sent to Amiga Inc. in the beginning, and only a percentage of the sales amount were promised to Amiga Inc., with the majority going straight to Ralph Schmidt and the rest of the MorphOS Dev. Team. Going back to the wide spread belief that McBill wanted control of the OS, which seems to be believed by many/most AmigaOS & MorphOS users I have talked to, or read forum posts from, just does not sense with no payment for the work done, even for a con man like McBill??? Granting a license to use the nave "AmigaOS", seems to me that Amiga Inc. would have been giving away the only valuable part of their IP rights that they still owned, which would require a high price for the license, or a very high percentage of all sales of AmigaOS4.x. Maybe I am misunderstanding something about the situation and the people involved, including the purpose and goals of Ralph Schmidt and the rest of the MorphOS Dev. Team members. McBill's intentions and goals have always been transparent and obvious, as simply a tool to drain investor's bank accounts with false promises and unrealistic expectations, and to somehow keep Amiga users hoping for something McBill was never going to be able to produce and deliver, an upgraded version of AmigaOS, without using outside contractors, or buying someone else's similar OS design and adapt it to some cheap hardware, that he could sell for a high (and disappointing to buyers) profit mark-up.

Do you know who, or which party that participated in those discussions, initiated the first contact between MorphOS Dev. Team, and McBill of Amiga Inc.?

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Yes, perhaps you are correct regarding how many active AmigaOS/AROS/MorphOS users there were during the time those discussion were going on, but I guess my number was the remaining users at that time, plus many users who had only recently become former users of Classic & NG Amiga systems. It is my belief that if the right decision had been made at that time (meaning that MorphOS had become the new AmigaOS4.x, and enough word of mouthy promotion of the new AmigaOS4 was done, we might have seen many of those former Amiga users come back, at least to see what was being offered, and how well it worked. Of course, a lot would have hinged on the reliability and performance without crashing or locking up, any new PPC based hardware would have been. If the early AmigaOne hardware problems repeated them selves exactly as the past played out, then the resulting harm might have been even worse that it was in our past history, and may have done even more harm to Amiga Inc. and the MorphOS Dev. Team, who would have shared some of the blame, even if they had nothing to do with the decisions about what hardware to use. Not until version 2.0, and the first release that would run on the PPC Mac Mini and beyond, would we have a low cost, relatively high performance AmigaOS4.x system that almost everyone could find and afford to buy.

Maybe we could then return to a number close to hundreds of thousands, instead of tens of thousands back then, or perhaps 3,000 to 5,000 users we probably have today using MorphOS3.9. One thing I am certain of is that if MorphOS would have been purchased to give it the name "AmigaOS4.x", or if Amiga Inc. had granted the MorphOS Dev. Team a license to use the name AmigaOS4, then there would never have been all the mud slinging and destructive talk about MorphOS being illegal, and we would have had many more users, including perhaps some of the current AROS users and all of the current AmigaOS4.x users. Development would have been much faster, and by this time today, we would already have all the features promised for AmigaOS4.2 (except the promises that don't make sense, or the ones which will produce less that satisfactory results, no matter how many development hours and/or dollars are thrown at the problem.

Things would definitely be different, and I choose to believe that any changes from the way it is now, would make this alternate reality, of the history of the last 10 to 15 years, immensely better than the way things are now, with AmigaOS4.x users currently depending on Hyperion's false promises, and suffering with their inability to produce timely and effective results. A-eon's attempts to make things better for AmigaOS4.x users is admirable, but they are not in control of AmigaOS4.x, so they can only do so much with their hands tied, and they too are at the mercy of the (often bad) decisions made by Hyperion's owner(s)/manager(s).