[Korodny]

Originally Posted by wXR

I want to create a situation where anyone who wants to work on AmigaOS, can fork it themselves

Okay. You downplaying any statements regarding the complexity of such an effort (working on the existing code) in this and the other thread made me wonder.

The AmigaDocuments site aleady gives us a pretty clear idea of who might own these materials;

Would you mind telling us who that would be? I've been following this very closely for a decade and a half (I'm covering it for amiga-news.de), and I certainly have no "pretty clear idea" who might own these materials. Could be either ESCOM's creditors or Amiga Washington's, but that are just wild guesses.

the idea is to hire an attorney who can take it further and verify the research

There is no research yet. I love the Amiga Documents effort, but it's not a substitute for proper research. In the trial against Hyperion even the judge noticed at one point that the AInc crowd was simply making up documents as they needed them (they had backdated an allegedly for or five year old contract a week too far) And the players from that trial are dead or gone now, Same goes for the original AInc investor ("Invisible Hand", IIRC) that was shut down ages ago.

The whole point of that entire AInc Washington/KMOS/AInc Delaware mess was to make sure there's no trail to follow. These were all privately held companies, so the only ways to extort information would be to find creditors willing to be part of a trial and fund them.

At which point I would make an offer to the relevant parties, and either pay for the relicensing myself (if within range), or publicly crowdfund it.

Again: unless you're willing to burn a lot of money, the only sane approach would be to not look too closely, assume that nobody else will because of the problems listed above and make an offer to Cloanto.

I understand that the UK and Germany had the largest Amiga communities in the world, so don't you actually have the most to gain from the above scenario? Would you prefer another fantasy about a highly organized company coming in to take care of everything?

The Amiga is a retro toy now, 99% of the user base has no real need for continued development - they certainly wouldn't mind, many would probably even donate to projects or buy ready-to-use ROM chips. But if none of that happens, they'll be fine with the ready-to-use ROM chips and Kickstart images available now and the P96 archive from Aminet.

You're simply 20 years to late.