>> According to what is known about those discussions, they were never about
>> Amiga Inc. paying for the development but about Amiga Inc. merely throwing
>> in the "Amiga" naming rights and maybe a Workbench license

> 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.

Yes, control in the sense of having decisional power over certain technical aspects of the OS, not control in the sense of getting ownership of the OS. That's no contradiction to what I wrote. I never said Amiga Inc's demands were appropriate.

> Surely he could not expect to obtain control of MorphOS/AmigaOS4 without paying for it

Depends on what exactly "control" means in this context. I guess Amiga Inc. thought that contributing the "Amiga" name was worth enough to justify demand of certain control over the OS.

> and using the sales revenue to continue developing it into the future.

Amiga Inc. developing an OS? For real?

> 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

I mean a binary or object code license for the Workbench of AmigaOS 3.1, not a name license. Ambient didn't exist yet, as I wrote.

> and I assume the use of all AmigaOS3.x source code

I don't remember having read this was part of the plan.

> 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

Why? That's what they did with Hyperion after all. Note that I didn't even claim Amiga Inc. were trying to do this with MorphOS. There are other ways both Amiga Inc. and the MorphOS team could have benefited financially from cooperation regarding the OS.

> 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

As said, I think there may have been some misinterpretations regarding the meaning of the word "control" in this specific context.

> 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

...which could include granting Amiga Inc. a say over technical aspects :-)

> 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

If this really was true, he wouldn't have found even one single investor :-)

> and to somehow keep Amiga users hoping for [...] an upgraded version of AmigaOS,
> without using outside contractors

Weren't Hyperion just that, and also Haage&Partner, the P96 team and Olaf "olsen" Barthel in the original OS4 project before Hyperion took over?

http://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=9360&start=45

Or do you mean the 15 months before the original OS4 project was announced in March/April 2001?

> 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.?

As I wrote, it was Olaf "olsen" Barthel who presented MorphOS to Amiga Inc. From this I conclude it was Amiga Inc. who first contacted Ralph Schmidt, either directly or via Olaf Barthel.

> 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

The Pegasos was already announced and in development back then, and Amiga Inc. was openly fond of it. Eyetech was not aware of the Teron boards yet and was still fully promoting the Escena-AmigaOne project. Of course, as it turned out, also the Pegasos was plagued by the problems of the Articia S.