Amiga OS 3.1 Source code leaked yesterday

[A1200]

I have taken a look at the archive, very interesting. Microsoft "Amiga" BASIC sources might get Bill Gates interested in legal proceedings as, from reading a biography of his, had an affection for BASIC and was giving it more airtime than arguably it should have received, years after BASIC went out of fashion.

I would say if anyone was to do something with this beyond just looking at it and uttering Spock's immortal short sentence - "Fascinating", then they should keep any development and improvements to themselves or a very close group of friends as an interesting internal project. To shout "Look at my new intuition.library" from a forum such as this or social media, said shouter should expect and deserve a knock on the door.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

It is not at all clear that Cloanto has the right to open source Amiga OS. And if he does, open sourcing it would make his whole business model moot. Kickstart is an integral part of classic Amiga OS.

Having a closer look at original CBM source code is interesting, but today we have AROS.

Cloanto does a bunch of things. Amiga Forever is not their entire or even primary business.

To everyone in this thread that keeps repeating how an army of lawyers would devour any poor old geezer trying to compile some 30 year old libs for a niche community...
Please walk me through the math here. "Show me the money"... Cost of lawyers vs the complexity of the copyright situation vs the desperately small number of paying AmigaOS users...

Anyway, just set up a team of programmers in North Korea. No law or lawyer will ever get to them and the A500 is probably the best computer they can get hold of anyway so they will be motivated :-) :-) :-)

[squidbass]

A500 might be a bit advanced for lil kim

[xArtx]

There is no mention of Microsoft in the copyright headers, and searching
both basic folders for “Microsoft” only reveals comments about compatibility.

Originally Posted by A1200

I have taken a look at the archive, very interesting. Microsoft "Amiga" BASIC sources might get Bill Gates interested in legal proceedings as, from reading a biography of his, had an affection for BASIC and was giving it more airtime than arguably it should have received, years after BASIC went out of fashion.

[modrobert]

This source code belongs in the Amiga community, where it currently is, regardless of legal status or if it eventually becomes open source.

I read some fear mongering in this thread which makes me chuckle, granted, the random individual will always have a problem being sued by a corporation, simply because money is power. However, my experience working in several corporations during the 90s, including Sun Microsystems, makes me question the illusion in this thread that there are high standards of ethics regarding software development.

When working for a large company/corporation you pretty much learn to systematically violate any copyright that would prove beneficial to the team where you work, this is also backed by in-house lawyers who calculate any risks involved. You do whatever you can get away with, and then some, getting sued is part of the competition tactics, as well as reverse engineering any products the competition releases. Looking at the Amiga OS 3.1 source code you can see traces of this behaviour, it's just how software was developed back during the 90s, and perhaps it still is. Don't get me wrong, there is still plenty of innovation, but above all there is competition.

[A1200]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaBASIC. They definitely wrote it except the very early versions. Whether they could strip the copyright as it was done by Microsoft under contract I do not know.

Originally Posted by xArtx

There is no mention of Microsoft in the copyright headers, and searching
both basic folders for “Microsoft” only reveals comments about compatibility.

[xArtx]

It’s not just that, it has another company in headers all through the files:
"Copyright (c) 1984 Tenchstar Ltd.”

It’s actually this one, not Microsoft:
"MetaComCo's ABasiC, which was included in AmigaOS 1.0 and 1.1”

Originally Posted by A1200

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaBASIC. They definitely wrote it except the very early versions. Whether they could strip the copyright as it was done by Microsoft under contract I do not know.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by A1200

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaBASIC. They definitely wrote it except the very early versions. Whether they could strip the copyright as it was done by Microsoft under contract I do not know.

If I remember correctly, the original Amiga did not ship with AmigaBASIC, but with a different BASIC interpreter created by MetaComCo (ABasiC).

AmigaBASIC followed later, this being a port/adaptation of Macintosh BASIC. AmigaBASIC worked well enough on plain 68000 machines but not so much on 68020/68030, etc. machines which suggests to me that it really was Macintosh BASIC after all.

In the original 68000 Macintosh the address space was limited to 24 bits, and application software used the most significant bits of the addresses for "tagging" the memory properties. This seems to have been carried over to AmigaBASIC.

[idrougge]

It's not as though AmigaBasic (or ABasic for that matter) is what anyone wants out of this source dump. Just throw the garbage into NIL:.

[absence]

Originally Posted by copse

Personally, I have a nostalgic appreciation for 1.3 and it's colour scheme. If someone dumped an archive of the source code for that and it was fixed up and remained backwards compatible, that would be a worthy hobby project in and of itself.

Oh wow, that would be something. OS 1.4!

[Firestone]

I have to admit that this must be the most interesting thread I have read so far on this forum.
+1 Olaf for giving us first class Amiga-history! Fantastic

[xArtx]

It would be interesting I think, to see Gate's early code.
He wouldn't name exception functions fuckup & screwup I don't think lol.
They look to be caught exception functions, possibly the user programmer's fuckups & screwups.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by xArtx

It would be interesting I think, to see Gate's early code.
He wouldn't name exception functions fuckup & screwup I don't think lol.
They look to be caught exception functions, possibly the user programmer's fuckups & screwups.

Steven Levy's book "Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution" tells as part of its story how Microsoft BASIC was pirated by the "homebrew computer" community in the 1970ies. That was the BASIC interpreter which Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote for the Intel 8080, as used in the early Altair 8800 computer.

That source code, commented, etc. surfaced a few years ago. I believe you can still find it in that form.

[mark_k]

If anyone wants to play with ABasiC...

http://aminet.net/package/dev/basic/ABasiC_progs
http://aminet.net/package/dev/basic/ABasiC_patch

[xArtx]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

That source code, commented, etc. surfaced a few years ago. I believe you can still find it in that form.

Yes I’ll have a dig for it, thanks, I think it would be worth a look.
I assume the executable stuff would have been easy to rip off for the Altair,
but that Gates was already into vertical marketing selling the BASIC to MITS per unit.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

It's a little sad when you consider Operating Systems like Linux and Android are open source while an old underdeveloped OS from the 80s is not.

There is a trend in open sourcing old operating systems, for example Microsoft has made early MSDOS source available:

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm...y-source-code/

Early Amiga OS sources should have this treatment too.

Originally Posted by ptyerman

And what magical pink unicorn is going to appear IF it was open sourced? It would end up abandoned and forgotten just like the thousands of open source projects that lay dormant.

Open source projects are in active development only when anyone find it interesting to maintain them, and sometimes even open source products can be considered "finished". There are plenty of examples of "dormant" open source projects that woke to life when changes were needed (due to security risks, protocol changes, interpreter changes etc). The entire point of open source is not to secure development of the software, but to have sources available for anyone who for whatever reasons feel a need to make changes.

For Amiga OS there are for sure plenty of people who are interested in taking peaks and improve bits and pieces. Old sources with comments and documentation are very good for reference. For example if you were to write a serial.device for new hardware, using sources of the original serial.device as a template helps you a long way.

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

How do you build intuition.library if you did not have a Sun 3 workstation handy?

Well, duh... by using an emulator of course

http://www.abiyo.net/retrocomputing/...intme08onlinux

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

It is not at all clear that Cloanto has the right to open source Amiga OS. And if he does, open sourcing it would make his whole business model moot. Kickstart is an integral part of classic Amiga OS.

Having a closer look at original CBM source code is interesting, but today we have AROS.

How on earth would open sourcing Amiga OS make Cloanto'd business model moot? Their business model is pretty much to sell a package based around a piece of open source in the first place, namely WinUAE. If anything, an open source Amiga OS is something Cloanto could _benefit_ from.

For the record - I have bought AmigaForever probably 2-3 times, and not once was it to get access to kickstarts or OS software, it was always about the extra material and supporting them to continue to collect more extra material. If they would organize the OS sources in a manner that it could be browsed and linked to in a context maybe with comments from original developers, that would be awesome.

[idrougge]

I fear that you've managed to push AmigaOS a lot farther from open sourcing by repeatedly paying Cloanto/Amiga/whomever not to do so, Kolla.

[absence]

Originally Posted by kolla

There is a trend in open sourcing old operating systems, for example Microsoft has made early MSDOS source available:

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm...y-source-code/

Early Amiga OS sources should have this treatment too.

Releasing old source code to the public usually involves lawyers to make sure the company is legally in the clear, and as such can be quite expensive for a struggling niche company. It would be nice if old Amiga OS sources were released, but it's doubtful that whoever owns the rights can justify it economically. For a company like Microsoft it's a relatively cheap way to look good in the news.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by kolla

Well, duh... by using an emulator of course

http://www.abiyo.net/retrocomputing/...intme08onlinux

Been there, done that (in 1996), using the NetBSD 68k SunOS compatibility layer on my A3000UX.

I had to tweak the kernel code, because the compatibility layer would either run Sun 2 binaries or Sun 3 binaries, but not both. The Sun 2 was not binary compatible with the Sun 3, but it worked the other way round. The NetBSD code did not see it quite like that

Anyway, cross compilation was not a solution to the problem. Porting was the goal.

Originally Posted by kolla

There is a trend in open sourcing old operating systems, for example Microsoft has made early MSDOS source available:

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm...y-source-code/

Early Amiga OS sources should have this treatment too.

I share your opinion, but as I had to learn, this is not yet possible. Both Cloanto and Hyperion only have licenses to use certain material, but the licenser alone can contribute historic code to the Computer History Museum.

I, for one, would like to see Exec and Intuition to be in the museum's collection.

[Superman]

Hyperion have now released an official statement about this leak. It can be read here:

http://www.vintageisthenewold.com/hy...rce-code-leak/