• Yokemate of Keyboards
    Yokemate of Keyboards
    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
    From: Germany
    > There was a rumour that the Friedens took Hyperion to court for
    > ownership of ExecSG.

    This "rumour" is fairly well documented (see comment #73). And it wasn't just Hyperion on the defendant side.

    > whether it actually was settled before it hit the courts is unknown
    > as well. As is the general timeline of when it would have happened -
    > no court documents ever appeared.

    A settlement wouldn't really have made sense as it was a negative declaratory action started in May 2007. The alleged outcome (somewhen after July 2008, as the case was reported as pending (p. 4) then) was that ExecSG was confirmed being the property of the Friedens (as well as HDSCSIToolkit the property of Vallinotto) so that Amiga Inc. couldn't get it from Hyperion even if another court should later decide that Hyperion was to hand over IP to Amiga Inc.

    From the December 2007 court documents (p. 27 to 34, exhibiting the May 2007 declaratory action):
    "[Hyperion] concluded an agreement under Belgian law with Messrs Thomas Frieden and Hans-Joerg Frieden [...] on 3 January 2002, called "Software development & license agreement". In [...] this agreement [...], the [Friedens] explicitly reserved to themselves all intellectual property rights on the developed software with the exception of the restricted license granted [...] to [Hyperion]. The software developed by the [Friedens] ("ExecSG") is described in Annex 1 of the agreement [...] between [Hyperion] and the [Friedens]."

    > the rumour that Hyperion were licensing ExecSG are unconfirmed.

    How should Hyperion have been able to sell OS4 containing ExecSG without obtaining a license to ExecSG from the Friedens? The January 2002 "Software development & license agreement" between Hyperion and the Friedens regarding ExecSG is contained in full in the May 2007 court documents (p. 5 to 16).

    > the Friedens have always been unwilling to part with their code

    According to the January 2002 "Software development & license agreement", Hyperion only has an object code license (as opposed to a source code license).
  • »17.03.19 - 21:13
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