P96 Licensing Status

[apex]

If you tell them bastards, I am sure they wont help. We fuck up the community by ourselves and the way we are discussing, same on a1k.

[Overflow]

Originally Posted by apex

If you tell them bastards, I am sure they wont help. We fuck up the community by ourselves and the way we are discussing, same on a1k.

Was thinking the same thing.

[emufan]

over at a1k - gunnar (vampire apollo) replys to thomas richter (thor)
(google translated this time):

Thomas, unfortunately you are telling only 50% of the story - why?


What happened is this:

1) P96 authors have allowed me the SDK free to use - until we make the project real money.

I have not yet made money - not one penny.

Although no money was taken I wanted to control the whole clean and had last year is licensed tried to buy.
As you know, the authors have my quotes but never answered.

2) Why I do not know.
But you kanstt you certainly still remember you had said then the P96 itself was not legally copy and other sources contained - perhaps that was the reason?

3) You then had Hyperion brought into play.
Hyperion was Euro 10 per License.
During the negotiations we went out of ~ 1000 sold Vampires.
So it was a total of 10,000 euros.

Hyperion had said clearly:
- No guarantee that the money is put into the development of 68K Picasso96
- We (Apollo) received no LAW error in P96 at fixed itself.
And if we wanted to fix errors then we are allowed no P96 release build yourself.

4) the time I had made a counterproposal:
We had offered to pay the money (10,000 euros for 1000 esteemed Vampire 2016) - under the Gedingung the money from Hyperion is used to fix to 68K software or continue to develop.
So under the condition that is used the money to improve the Amiga OS or P96 for 68k.
- As you know has rejected our proposal of Hyperion.

5) I had the P96 Authors Must we under these conditions of Hyperion but license like the P96 authors directly. We had then asked for an offer of Alex.
As you know we have received no offer.

6) Jason McMullan had then written kindly proverbial weekend a free driver.

7) We then decided to make better use of our money to support AROS. Jason (AROS) has clearly shown that there are people who also want to develop. I think that for good and unterstuetzens worth.


We have a Hyperion for Amiga fans made meaningful offer.
And we had several times you offered to pay the P96 authors directly.
So please do not assume that we do not want to pay!

while the above is good to know, majsta (vampire apollo) has some more interesting things to say:

Let me say only this, my mailbox are full of blackmail messages and I have saved all logs from IRC when few people tried to blackmail us inside apollo-team directly talking to me. At the time I wanted to publish all of this but agreement inside team was that we should continue to work and not waste time on this. Most interesting story was when one manager contacted me on IRC saying that BigGun is not telling the truth to the rest of us. Same time they were talking to him trying to convince him that such core can't work in amateur designed card like Vampire and that he should move on, to you know who. After all of that I received "contract" on my mail where basically says something like pay us money and we don't own license yet but we will and when we buy license we won't provide any upgrades or support you in any way. But at the end when you pay you can freely distribute what's already on aminet as a free package. If this story continues I ll provide all logs, "contracts" offers and even pictures of the card who was an offer from someone else in same group to replace Vampire and to destroy everything what's good inside apollo-team. Same people who tried same thing with minimig and I have also pictures to prove even that, pictures never published anywhere. Complete story is because Vampire and Apollo core will replace every card for Amiga. Milking time is over. Get over it!

[kipper2k]

the bottom line is that a lot of time and hair pulling was spent trying to resolve these issues and also the KS licensing issues. THe Amiga community is its own worst enemy and sometimes i just want to give up as you cannot make everyone happy no matter how hard you try. There is too much greed and no regard for others.

Building the boards for users with the cheapest options gets complaints that it looks cheap, charging more for a pre-assembled gets complaints that it is obviously too much. i shake my head!!

[gulliver]

Originally Posted by SMF

@Kolla

Do you also deny the holocaust? They were both operating on a shrinking market, the p5 produced cards lasted a little longer then the rest but then eventually we had the pci bussboards and the mediator turned out as the winner.

You are severely lacking memory, or you weren there in the 90´s.

CGX was the RTG system for the best cards out there (from Phase 5) and it supported many cards which were made by other manufacturers. It was a comercial product that end users had to pay for. It was hands down the best choice.

Then there was Picasso96 that tried compete with CGX by being shareware and by charging companies for the development of drivers or by handing them their driver development kit.

There was also SAGE from Commodore that predated all of them, but it had little publicity and had a premature death along with its parent company.

MacroSystem Gmbh also released RetinaEmu which was an unreliable piece of crap that supported Retina graphic cards, which were quite affordable back then.

The guys at ProDev which sold the Merlin graphics card, released ProBench which was shareware too.

Then we have the guys of GVP that sold their Spectrum and Impact Vision cards, along with its variants. They provided the EGS system, which was rather good, but not without quirks, and was very popular due to low cost and availability of their hardware.

So there was a lot of competition in the 90´s, but none had the features and quality CGX had.

By about the year 2000, things started to change in the Amiga scene. UAE appeared and also a driver for Picasso96, which made it really popular.
Then Elbox started to sell their Mediator busboards and chose PIcasso96 for them. CGX left the Amiga platform and went to become the driver standard in MorphOS.

So what kolla is telling you is a pretty adequate sumary of why Picasso96 is popular, but not the best choice, and why it wasnt even competing with them. There were many players back then and CGX was on the top of the hill until they left for MorphOS.

[dirkies]

For those who speak German, things are getting rather ugly in the a1k thread. To me is clear everyone knows the vampire could become a huge success, thus the vultures already start circling around to cash in on it. What a sad situation, hopefully common sense may prevail and not that the vampire team walks away as it's getting really political ugly wise so that it may start to discourage the team to carry on....

Maybe drop the whole p96 thing and do it another way, as this crap ain't worth it.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by dirkies

For those who speak German, things are getting rather ugly in the a1k thread. To me is clear everyone knows the vampire could become a huge success, thus the vultures already start circling around to cash in on it. What a sad situation, hopefully common sense may prevail and not that the vampire team walks away as it's getting really political ugly wise so that it may start to discourage the team to carry on....

Maybe drop the whole p96 thing and do it another way, as this crap ain't worth it.

I concur, the Vampire team need to ignore this nonsense, otherwise the person behind the email wins if they quit.

Now whilst the email exists and was sent, i'm still going to reiterate what I said before, and that is NO-ONE unless they are monumentally stupid, sends an email telling competition of their intentions to buy the rights to something they are using, they just don't let that information get out.

They stealthily secure the rights, THEN send emails.

So I repeat, this email is bollocks, it is speculative and simply there to scare off the competition, and do you know what? it appears to be working, because look at the fallout.

Those behind Vampire have clearly got the competition scared, thinking there was no real alternative. Now it appears there is, and everyone is clamouring for a low cost speed performance for their Amigas, and they don't like it.

Keep on doing it, and if needs be, those with the skills, can resource any drivers and redo them to include NO original code whatsoever thus negating this entire situation.

And theres plenty of those guys around that will be happy to help

[Overflow]

Originally Posted by kipper2k

the bottom line is that a lot of time and hair pulling was spent trying to resolve these issues and also the KS licensing issues. THe Amiga community is its own worst enemy and sometimes i just want to give up as you cannot make everyone happy no matter how hard you try. There is too much greed and no regard for others.

Building the boards for users with the cheapest options gets complaints that it looks cheap, charging more for a pre-assembled gets complaints that it is obviously too much. i shake my head!!

Well, I dont need to tell YOU how successful the Vampire is, with x hundred of boards passing thru your hands.
So I assume its the vocal minority that complaints, with the evidence in your order backlog

[spudje]

So, do I at least understand correctly that we wrongly accused a certain J as mail sender, while it actually was sent by Hyperion?

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by spudje

So, do I at least understand correctly that we wrongly accused a certain J as mail sender, while it actually was sent by Hyperion?

We know who sent this particular email, it wasn't Hyperion in this instance. The person was identified correctly in a1k

[dirkies]

I checked the a1k thread once more but i didn't see a name, just the same rumours as here that a certain J was behind it (?)

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by dirkies

I checked the a1k thread once more but i didn't see a name, just the same rumours as here that a certain J was behind it (?)

Some countries have privacy laws so i may not be allowed to say, if you read this thread though, i think someone already mentioned the name

[dirkies]

Ok. Understood. I saw a 'Springfield' nickname mentioned. Guess that might be it

[Heiroglyph]

Not to derail the thread, I think this is related.

You can't develop Cybergraphx drivers either, can you? I looked for that info years go and was told no.

Even though they charged for the software and charge for MorphOS, they don't want drivers written?

How did we end up the only OS family that I'm aware of who can't develop drivers to support the OS?

[Devlin]

All this licensing shit is why I stick to OS3.x and pre-RTG stuff. Anything past that and it's just asking for trouble.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Heiroglyph

Not to derail the thread, I think this is related.

How did we end up the only OS family that I'm aware of who can't develop drivers to support the OS?

Sad, right?
If there's no money to pay for new development then that should be proof enough that the platform is commercially dead (in case someone missed that) so whywould one choose to be remembered as a greedy bastard when he can do the sane thing and be remembered as a hero

Oh well....How did the once healthy(?) and happy(?) Amiga community end up with 68k Amiga OS3.x, PPC Amiga OS4.x, AROS, MorphOS. Clearly the track record doesn't show a great deal of interest to cooperate and get along.

http://www.quotes-central.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/i-believe-all-suffering-is-caused.png

[SMF]

I am getting drunk now so excuse for my silly proposal. But why dont the hw producers who wants to opensource other peoples work opensourcee their own work? I think it would be a good beginning if they opened up cgfx and then they open up the vampire secreeets.

[Heiroglyph]

Vampire is giving a way to pay for it.

Picasso96 is in a strange business model of:
1. Release binaries to the public.
2. Give no way to register and don't reply to inquiries.
3. ????
4. Profit!

At least Cgx was paid upfront, paid in MorphOS.

I still don't get why Cgx doesn't release the driver DDK though. How would that do anything except crush the competition?

They could start selling it online again since it would be the only legal option that can still be purchased. They wouldn't even need to update it, just start registration again.

I've got no problem paying if they're selling.

[SMF]

Originally Posted by Heiroglyph

Vampire is giving a way to pay for it.

Picasso96 is in a strange business model of:
1. Release binaries to the public.
2. Give no way to register and don't reply to inquiries.
3. ????
4. Profit!

At least Cgx was paid upfront, paid in MorphOS.

I still don't get why Cgx doesn't release the driver DDK though. How would that do anything except crush the competition?

They could start selling it online again since it would be the only legal option that can still be purchased. They wouldn't even need to update it, just start registration again.

I've got no problem paying if they're selling.

Blame it on Thomas and Frank, If we have the real Thoas here atm it moght become true but i have ny thougts...

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

in this case (it seems) that someone wants to monopolise the market through buying a specific software. So what is your strange posting about?

You mean just like Motorola monopolises the 68k CPU market?