Date:     Wed, 27 Oct 1999 17:48:38 +0200
From:     Sven Drieling Sven_Drieling@welcome.north.de
Subject:  [TA] AmigaOS Open Source (was Re: savetheamiga petetion)
To:       redaktion@amiga-news.de (Redaktion)

* Forwarded from newsgroup "a Mail"
* Originally from: Olaf Barthel (olsen-ta@sourcery.han.de)
* Original date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 18:38:30 +0100


On Oct 25 Nomad (Nomad of Norad (David C. Hall)) wrote:

> In a forwarded message, by "Steve Crietzman" president@savetheamiga.org.uk,
> which was written on 23 Oct 1999, was said:
>
> > I am considering creating a survey to collect some useful
> > numbers and statistics.  This should prove interesting either way,
> > but I am also considering making this into a petition, so that
> > those who would like to see AmigaOS open-sourced can give
> > their backing and support to the idea, and then have all
> > this information forwarding to Amiga President Tom Schmidt
> > - to help him in making his decision ;)
>
> Well, if we can get a huge enough group of people to go to the site and
> participate, then regardless of the answers we get, it might get GatesWay's
> attention simply from the numbers that show up.

   Before you start working on a petition, I'd like you to consider a few
things first. An open source AmigaOS is not going to cure all the problems we
are facing today. If you are going to ask for support, also ask why exactly you
want AmigaOS to go Open Source. What may come out of the equation might not be
what you are expecting. For example, AmigaOS is protected by a number of
patents of which the first may run out in the year 2003. Making the operating
system open source does not necessarily include the option that Gateway will
also hand over the patents. One such patent covers the way pull-down menus are
drawn on the Amiga. To avoid patent infringement, one would have to make major
changes to Intuition. Next thing, the name "Amiga" is a trademark, so is
"Kickstart", so is "Workbench", so is "AmigaGuide", so is "AmigaDOS" and a
number of other names. One would need to get permission to use these
trademarks, even for such innocent things as "amigaguide.library",
"workbench.library", etc. which concern the API. If you can't use those names,
you get into real trouble since the names are associated with the AmigaOS
programming interface. And don't forget that the material that ships on a
Workbench disk and the code and data you find in ROM is not exclusively owned
by Gateway. There is 3rd party material included which Commodore used to
license either in binary form or as a special kind of source code license
which did not allow for redistribution. This means for example, an open source
AmigaOS would not include ARexx, the Fountain/bullet.library font rasterizer,
CrossDOS, 68040.library, mathffp.library, the mathieee libraries, none of the
Adobe bitmap fonts, none of the AGFA CompuGraphic fonts, etc. Next comes the
question of build tools: a source code is dead material unless you can build a
working product from it. And AmigaOS is built using a variety of 3rd party
tools for which Commodore used to obtain licenses which did not allow for
redistribution either: part of the operating system is built using a `C'
compiler developed by Green Hills, Inc. You won't be able to use that compiler
without a license, and their products aren't cheap.

Ok, so far I have only touched some of the issues involved, but there are
plenty more (such as involving quality: most open source projects suffer from
ineffective to inexistant quality control; once this happens to AmigaOS, you
can expect most of the commercial developers left in the market to abandon
ship). The general impression I got so far is that the people who ask for
making AmigaOS open source do not realize what it is they would be getting.
Worse, they don't even know exactly why they are asking for it. All by itself,
the source code won't help us. There's plenty more to take into consideration.

Take great care, as it may be possible that Gateway, unaware of the details,
may make the decision to turn the AmigaOS source code loose, but fail to
provide for the means to allow it to survive. Then AmigaOS will be really
dead, killed by legal restrictions.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Home: Olaf Barthel, Brabeckstrasse 35, D-30559 Hannover
 Net: olsen@sourcery.han.de (Home), olsen@logicalline.com (Work)

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Date:     Wed, 27 Oct 1999 17:51:37 +0200
From:     Sven Drieling Sven_Drieling@welcome.north.de
Subject:  Re: [TA] AmigaOS Open Source (was Re: savetheamiga petetion
To:       redaktion@amiga-news.de (Redaktion)

* Forwarded from newsgroup "a Mail"
* Originally from: Olaf Barthel (olsen-ta@sourcery.han.de)
* Original date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 09:35:54 +0100


On Oct 27 wurzel (wurzel) wrote:

> Hiya, on Tue, 26 Oct 1999 18:38:30 +0100,
> Olaf Barthel wrote about *"[TA] AmigaOS Open Source (was Re: savetheamiga
petetion)".*
>
> >    Before you start working on a petition, I'd like you to consider a few
> > things first. An open source AmigaOS is not going to cure all the problems we
> > are facing today. If you are going to ask for support, also ask why exactly you
> > want AmigaOS to go Open Source. What may come out of the equation might not be
> > what you are expecting. For example, AmigaOS is protected by a number of
> > patents of which the first may run out in the year 2003. Making the operating
> > system open source does not necessarily include the option that Gateway will
> > also hand over the patents. One such patent covers the way pull-down menus are
> > drawn on the Amiga. To avoid patent infringement, one would have to make major
> > changes to Intuition. Next thing, the name "Amiga" is a trademark, so is
> > "Kickstart", so is "Workbench", so is "AmigaGuide", so is "AmigaDOS" and a
> > number of other names. One would need to get permission to use these
> > trademarks, even for such innocent things as "amigaguide.library",
> > "workbench.library", etc. which concern the API. If you can't use those names,
> > you get into real trouble since the names are associated with the AmigaOS
> > programming interface. And don't forget that the material that ships on a
>
> [Snip a whole load of well informed reasoning]
>
> Thanks, Olaf, for putting things straight!

   Credit where credit is due, the issue was originally raised by
Holger Kruse on a private mailing list. I have both abridged and
tried to add to his original argumentation (for example, the
term "open source" is very loosely defined today; one would have
to agree on a common definition).

> I am not a developer and do not jump onto the bandwagon "Make AmigaOS Open
> Source", because I did not know exactly what that meant. Now you have
> clearly shown what it entails and I agree with you that it is a bad idea.
> FWIW, IMHO etc.

   I tried to keep the message neutral. Making AmigaOS Open Source may
work out, but there are risks attached to such an attempt which may make
it impractical. Whether this makes it a good or a bad idea is a decision
that's up to the reader. I used to advocate making AmigaOS Open Source,
but Holger made me reconsider.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Home: Olaf Barthel, Brabeckstrasse 35, D-30559 Hannover
 Net: olsen@sourcery.han.de (Home), olsen@logicalline.com (Work)

From:      Giorgio Signori yurex@tin.it
To:        team@amiga-news.de
Date:      Tue, 26 Oct 1999 17:20:16 +0200
Subject:   Softwave Announces a new CD based Amiga Magazine

For Immediate Release

Napoli, Italy, 25 October 1999

Web Site: http://www.skylink.it/ear

Dear Amigans,

My name is Giorgio Signori, and I am the director of Softwave, a new company
born in Italy this summer. I have been writing on the only Italian Amiga
magazine, Enigma Amiga Run, in the past years, and I am in Amiga
environment since years. After years writing for Amiga, I decided to build
up a new company to publish an Amiga-only, CD-based magazine. After a lot
of work, at the Amiga show Softwave was there with the first issue of
Amiga.it, showed during the conference with Petro Tyschtschenko. After
this, we decided to publish Amiga.it, under the name Amiga.news, also
outside Italy. We put much effort in this, translating, for now, the whole
magazine in English. We will show and sell the first issue of Amiga.news at
the next Home Electronics World of Cologne, on 12-14 November.

We hope that the public response will be enough to convince us to keep doing
a multi-language magazine also for the next issues. If so, since the 3rd
issue, we will translate it also in German, as many of you already
requested. In the next days in the site www.skylink.it/ear will be published
the summary of
the first issue.

But now, some of the highlights of Amiga.news:

The magazine part count many important writers here in Italy. Editors like
ing. Massimo Gais, system administrator of the Italian Aminet node and of
the Astronomic Observatory of Naples, like ing. Alessio Cappelli, expert in
Amiga and NetBSD environments. People like Massimo Marino, writer for the
biggest selling videogames magazine in Italy, The Games Machine, and Nick
Mordock, experienced Amiga writer since years. Not to mention Andrea
Favini, the 3000+ staff and Laura Falzone, writers of proved experience.

The CD part of Amiga.news differs from what we are used to see on the
market. it will not be a simple shareware collection. Of course it will
contain the recent shareware software from month to month, with index and
search function, but it will be thematic. The first issue of Amiga.it,
published only in Italian, had Linux as theme of the month, with a
RedHatPPC distribution and a serie of articles dedicated to installation of
Linux, but not only. Every month a different theme will fill the CD. I can
anticipate that on the issue that will be presented at Cologne, there will
be a much requested Linux68k/RedHat68 distribution, and a special on Star
Wars on Amiga.

I am available for every question, I will be happy to give all the answers
you may need, if you are a user or an Amiga distributor/reseller. You can
find me at the mailbox yurex@tin.it.

Giorgio Signori
Director of Softwave

-----------------------------------------------------------
Giorgio Signori "Yure^DKG"  ICQ:20451038  \  PowerUP 040+603@240 SCSI  \
Amiga.it Staff  -  Italian Amiga magazine  \  AIT HP:www.skylink.it/ear \
Home Page: http://space.tin.it/io/giorsign  \  System Shock Solutions PR \