Well, here is my take on things...
Cloanto has done a great job with Amiga Forever. Superb product. Why couldn't they just sign some sort of agreement with Hyperion to distribute 3.1.4 ROMs going forward? Or even sell the full 3.1.4? Win-win.
I don't believe Cloanto has any developers that could possibly work with the source code. For better or worse the developers that know how the system ticks, know the history, and know what they are doing bringing OS3.1 forward are working with Hyperion. They have the OS4 sources handy and could start back-porting what makes sense.
I can see OS3.1 forking into a "For classics" flavour and a "big boy" flavour that assumes your machine has at least 64MB of memory or something like that. There is still a lot of legacy support in 3.1.4. Perhaps some of that could be stripped/simplified in the "big boy" flavour.
In addition I think that open-sourcing at least some parts of OS3.1 could really help. A cool experiment. Pick something. scsi.device?
No comment on all the legal tit-for-tat. Hopefully at some point all parties involved come to their senses and work together for mutual benefit. The market can be grown for both OS3 and OS4 if better cooperation ensued.
Hopefully I don't get this thread frozen...
