Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:

This is a pretty accurate description of the history of this whole thing, at least as far as I know it. Andy and I were consulting on software and hardware development, respectively, at Amiga Technologies at the time. Phase V was trying really hard to get involved with AT, including offering to license a C Exec, and perhaps other pieces, of the AmigaOS. Andy did a code review, and what came out of that was largely the reason AT did not enter into any agreements with Phase V.

And do keep in mind, the AmigaOS was a bit of a mess at the time. Some modules could only be built in Greenhills C on a Sun workstation. The first major software project done at AT was to get everything to build correctly under Lattice on an Amiga. And there were definite plans to build a HAL (done right, this not only eliminates system difference issues in the OS, but endian concerns as well) and a PowerPC port.

I have no first-hand knowledge of ANY of the Phase V code going into MorphOS. The copyright issues certainly still apply -- if anyone studied, say, the Amiga Exec source code, then went and built their own clone, that would still violate copyrights. But I don't know that to be true either, and Ralph says it's not, so I'm more than happy to take him at his word.

I'm not sure what information Gary Peake was privvy to while at Amiga, Inc. He was about the only guy there I'd trust anyway. But he might simply have been repeating stuff that Bill McEwan or fleecy moss said.

Honestly, I was frustrated with nearly every "Amiga" effort after Amiga Technologies/ESCOM bit the dust. PIOS/Metabox tried and failed to get the rights to use AmigaOS, and as a result, got in bed with Apple, and that ulitmately killed the PIOS One project. Gateway wanted to basically toss AmigaOS out and replace it with Linux; Amiga, Inc. wanted to toss AmigaOS out and replace it with Tao-OS. And MorphOS was fragmenting an already weak community by offering an Amiga clone. But hey, anything you can cling to I guess -- the AmigaOS and all spinoffs have been largely irrelevant for a good decade now, at least on the scale of computer industry things.