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"Disclaimer – Retro Games Ltd, THEC64(tm) are in no way associated with Commodore Holdings B.V. THEC64(tm) have not been prepared, approved, or licensed by Commodore Holdings B.V in any way and are not licensed to use the Commodore(R) name or 'Chicken Head' logo. The Commodore Roms, BIOS and THEC64(tm) form factor are officially licensed from Cloanto https://cloanto.com/"

As far as I was aware only the software is licensed, and it's nothing to do with Commodore Holdings B.V. who own the Commodore brand name?

Whoa calm down! It doesn't matter if Linux actually infringes or not, corporations will still be leary about adoption as long as there are claims out there that it does. That it is the exact definition of encumbered, the adoption of Linux is impeded by a heavy load, that being the bad publicity from the SCO and Microsoft/Novell fiascos.

Do you remember this issue, when there was a BSD driver that was included in Linux and was re-licenced as GPL by mistake? Or how about this one, where the OpenBSD project stripped the comments from a GPL'd driver and re-licensed it as BSD? Obviously there are some copyright issues slipping through the cracks even among the different OSS projects. Since Linux has so many contributors from so many different places, it is easy for a company to start spreading claims that one piece, somewhere, might be infringing.

As soon as the corporate lawyers get wind of that kind of thing, they'll push to avoid adoption and to migrate solutions away from Linux. Look at the Unisys LZW patent in GIF files or the Fraunhofer patents in MP3 files. Companies were panicking because they might have an MP3 stored somewhere, without any understanding of the actual issue.

It was exactly these kinds of shenanigans that led to the development of PNG as a replacement for GIF in Web browsers. Hopefully the same thing happens here (broad acceptance of a new standard), whether the replacement is Theora or something better.

Besides in the USA, software is only copyrighted not patented (yet).

The Unisys LZW patent was available to the public, and Unisys was enforcing the patent in other areas (e.g., communications) prior to the creation of the GIF format.

CompuServe simply dropped the ball by using LZW compression in their GIF image specification.

Unisys acted like a bunch of jerks after the fact, but they didn't start the fire. CIS did.

Some supporting information

Disclaimer: I worked for Unisys for 4.5 years in the late 80's and early 90's, and I also knew a number of friends and acquaintances who were active in the shareware community (as I was on RIME and Fido) when the GIF controversy broke, so I may have a bias in either direction (or both ).

Do you remember the GIF patent affair?

I'm sorry to say, you're distorting facts. The problem with GIF was that Unisys had a patent for the LZW compression algorithm, an algorithm used by GIF. The fact that the GIF standard was open and public only caused trouble because GIF was widely deployed with patented algorithm. There was a patent, and no one knew about it. Pick up any not-so-old book on compression, and you will see LZW. See here for more info on the GIF controversy.

What Mono has is an ECMA standard. This is entirely different. What they do is a clean room implementation. So, anything people say about MS claiming patent rights on Mono is just FUD, and probably boils down to prior art and the open standard published in a widely-known standards body. Seems hard to hold up in court...This is why a standard by a overseer like ISO, ANSI or ECMA is so important. This is not your de-facto-standard-via-implementation phenomenom, like Perl, Python, etc. This is different: big players, industry, corporations, etc. And no libre software license to go with it.

OTOH, as someone said in another thread, what if another company buys Sun Microsystems? What happens to the dear JCP? It all goes down the drain, because there's no garantee.

So, to sum it up, Java is a liability to the libre software community.

With the GIF format, there was a problem in that the patent was not obvious. The article that described the LZW technique did not mention the patent. In the USA, it is possible to publish a technique and then patent the technique no later than 12 months aftewards. Another problem with the GIF situation was how the patented technique became frozen into an image format which was meant to be open. Due to backwards compatibility, it was not possible to substitute a nonpatented technique afterwards.

I prefer REXX scripts, especially AREXX, but Ruby is cool too.

--
Amiga Forever

how do you explain problems with GIF and JPEG file formats...

I believe the big issue was with the patented LZW compression algorithm that GIF uses rather than the file format itself. Here's the first link I found on Google.

What does this mean for Cloanto's Amiga Forever? do they still have the rights to redistribute the old OSes and Kickstarts?

Also, KMOS, Inc., seems to be a new company, which aquired Itec, LLC, who was in agreement with Amiga, Inc.

KMOS seems to be creating a website at this time.
Apparently KMOS's website

"UAE" is free and legal as is the software at "Back 2 The Roots" but what you still need is a legal version of the Amiga Kickstart.

Fortunatly, the people behind Amiga Forever have you covered. They sell a licensed copy of the Amiga's Kickstart and it's OS. Actually, their package has several versions of the Kickstart/OS so you can pick and choose which Amiga flavor to emulate including the A500 (which most games were designed for), CDTV and CD32. The disc even contains an interview with Jay Miner!

Support legal emulation.

IBM filed a patent application on June 1, 1983 (that eventually became U.S. Pat. 4,814,746) on some stuff that included compression like LZW.

Unisys filed its application on June 20, 1983 (now U.S. Pat. 4,558,302) listing Welch as the inventor of what we all now know as LZW.

As the story goes, Welch described the LZW algorithm in IEEE Computer in June 1984.

Unisys's patent issued on December 10, 1985.

CompuServe didn't release the GIF specification until 1987.

What ticked everybody off was when Unisys figured out in 1994 that it had had a patent on LZW the whole time and started charging royalties on all GIF software developed thereafter.

Thanks are due to mcb, who documented his sources.

IBM filed a patent application on June 1, 1983 (that eventually became U.S. Pat. 4,814,746) on some stuff that included compression like LZW.

Unisys filed its application on June 20, 1983 (now U.S. Pat. 4,558,302) listing Welch as the inventor of what we all now know as LZW.

As the story goes, Welch described the LZW algorithm in IEEE Computer in June 1984.

Unisys's patent issued on December 10, 1985.

CompuServe didn't release the GIF specification until 1987.

What ticked everybody off was when Unisys figured out in 1994 that it had had a patent on LZW the whole time and started charging royalties on all GIF software developed thereafter.

Thanks are due to mcb, who documented his sources.

IBM filed a patent application on June 1, 1983 (that eventually became U.S. Pat. 4,814,746) on some stuff that included compression like LZW.

Unisys filed its application on June 20, 1983 (now U.S. Pat. 4,558,302) listing Welch as the inventor of what we all now know as LZW.

As the story goes, Welch described the LZW algorithm in IEEE Computer in June 1984.

Unisys's patent issued on December 10, 1985.

CompuServe didn't release the GIF specification until 1987.

What ticked everybody off was when Unisys figured out in 1994 that it had had a patent on LZW the whole time and started charging royalties on all GIF software developed thereafter.

Thanks are due to mcb, who documented his sources.

There seems to be some confusion with regard to which OSes/solutions this effort is directed at. Currently there are 4 main 68k Amiga compatible solutions DiscreetFX would like to see supported. For two first one listed below PPC native versions would be preferable:

1) AmigaOS4

This is the official new AmigaOS developed for classic Amigas upgraded with PPC accelerators and new AmigaOne computers which are being sold with G3 and G4 processors.

Some of the latest but still unfinished screenshots of AmigaOS4:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=560
AmigaOne motherboards can already be bought in combination with Linux at the following dealers (AmigaOS4 will be delivered for free as soon as it is finished): http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/dealers.php

With MOL MacOS X can also already be used with this system (as well as with the Peg below):

http://www.anythingamiga.com/XEPics/x2.jpg.html

2) MorphOS

Its ABOX environment is a re-implementation of version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system. The re-implemted Exec kernel is hosted on top of a Quark microkernel. The OS is fast and responsive and currently runs with G3 Pegasos motherboards. Interested people will have to wait for the Pegasos II, which is planned for release in September. An interesting review can be found at OSNews:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3589

3) AROS

An open source project intended as a multi-platform re-implementation of version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system. Most of the development takes place on x86 computers. Much of the source code was used for MorphOS. http://www.aros.org/

4) UAE, Amithlon and other 68 AmigaOS emulators

AmigaOS XL: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=604
Amiga Forever: http://cloanto.com/amiga/forever/

The end of the story seems to be that the patent supposedly expires sometime about now, either last December or this June, depending on who you ask.

For the curious, here's a link and here's another

Oh, I've got UAE. I even bought Amiga Forever so I could have legal roms, but it's still not the same thing as having a real Amiga in front of you clicking the drives every 10 seconds. :)

Thanks though.

You forgot UAE .

Recent versions of this emulator can be used on daily basis. Genesi stated that they'll include a PPC version in the official release of MorphOS.

You can buy the x86 supported edition (with legal kickstart ROMs and a fully functional workbench) at Cloanto's. I used it once and it made a very good impression on me. :-)

The product to which you refer, Amiga Forever, is still available. It's a very useful investment if you still have a lot of Amiga software you want to run under UAE.

Did none of you have an Amiga?

The Amiga had/has EVERYTHING game-wise, and usually beter than the PC counterparts.

You need a ROM for UAE to work (get one from a real Amiga or pay for Amiga Forever from www.cloanto.com), but if/when you have one you can go to back2roots.org and download tons of stuff.

Mostly commercial games. The website has got permission from all of the relevant software companies to host the games on the site.

Between 1987 and 1994, GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) peacefully became the most popular file format for archiving and exchanging computer images. At the end of December 1994, CompuServe Inc. and Unisys Corporation announced to the public that developers would have to pay a license fee in order to continue to use technology patented by Unisys in certain categories of software supporting the GIF format. These first statements caused immediate reactions and some confusion. As a longer term consequence, it appears likely that GIF will be replaced and extended by new file formats, but not so before the expiration of the patent which caused so much debate.

Among the first reactions, some bulletin board systems had all GIF files deleted from their hard disks (or converted into JPEG format). Common remarks included:

"PROTEST OF NEW COMPUSERVE-UNISYS GIF USAGE TAX !!"

"They [CompuServe] seem to think that GIF is the greatest thing since free online magazines."

"The announcement by CompuServe and Unisys that users of the GIF image format must register by January 10 and pay a royalty or face lawsuits for their past usage, is the online communications community's equivalent of the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor."

http://www.cloanto.com/users/mcb/19950127giflzw.ht ml

The IBM patent application was filed three weeks before that of Unisys, but the US patent office apparently failed to recognize that they covered the same algorithm. (The IBM patent is more general, but its claim 7 is said to be exactly LZW.)

--xPhase

This ambush of the digitial imaging industry will probably stand as the worst public relations nightmare a company can inflict upon itself.

Rather like the Unisys LZW (GIF) patent fiasco from, when was it, 1994? Or the more recent Fraunhofer MP3-compression patent enforcement?

Either the company will cave in, or the software developers will, and we'll all move on to a different JPEG compression technology. Same as before.

oever asks:

Where is the problem exactly with patents in GPL-ed software?

Worst case scenario: a patent could make it illegal to use a particular software package, even one licensed under the GPL. Depending on patent laws, it could also interfere with redistributing GPL code.

If a company has a patent on a software technique and writes and distributes GPL code to implement it, anybody can use this code. Or can't they?

Potentially not. The GPL is a copyright license, it gives people the right to distribute the software. It is not a patent license, it does not grant people the right to use any patents.

A patent holder who is friendly to the Free software community will provide, seperately from the GPL, a license permitting anyone to use, for free, the patent within the context of software licensed under a Free Software license. The DFSG makes a good set of guidelines for this purpose. Generally such licenses are void if you sue the patent holder over their use of your own patents. These are called Royalty-Free patents (or RF Patents). Some companies, whose patents are purely defensive, give a royalty-free license to everyone who isn't suing them.

To my knowledge, SCC has not done this for the patents connected to SELinux. This is why people are upset.

And can people modify that code? I guess one cannot write new GPL-ed code that does the same thing.

You can modify existing code or write new code if and only if you do so within the bounds of the above discussed patent licenses.

Or can a company charge you for using the GPL-ed code with patents?

Yes they can. Let's say the ACME Software company comes up with a great streaming video codec, they post the specifications online and encourage people to use it. A group of people take those specifications and make programs to make, broadcast and view ACME video, the program gets distributed widely. Two years later we find that prior to publishing the spec, ACME quietly filed for a patent, and it has come through.

My understanding is that ACME would have the legal right (though not the moral right, IMHO) to charge everyone who uses that software, or who has used it in the two year period while the patent is pending, for each time they use the software, or distribute files that were made with that software. This scenario is not that different from what Unisys did with LZW encryption, and GIF files.

Note: I am not a lawyer, none of the above should be construed as legal advice.

Theoretically?

I recently got a copy of Amiga Forever 5.0, and I tried out WinUAE with that. I also installed AmigaOS 3.9 to it and it worked just fine. Even when I am not really a big Amiga fan (more of a foamy-mouthed Commodore 64 user =) I must say I'm really impressed... With the JIT stuff and the bsdsockets, it worked fast and supported network. A real, hardware C64 can do ISDN (with proper RS232 buffering, of course), but now I have an emulated Amiga that does DSL =)

(Screenshots? 1 2 3)

Of this stuff, I have to say I'm impressed, too - no need to boot to some other OS to run another, which means some more stability - UAE 0.8 isn't 100% stable yet. Very nifty.

(And I think Amiga hardware was pretty nice, but PC got ahead of it at last (after so many years!) when they ditched ISA bus and got USB input devices.)

I need to get the JIT + bsdsockets for *NIX UAE soon. Too bad the fullscreen modes in X11 UAE often suck - DGA, with its r00t requirement, means trouble. Anyone working on a SDL port?

I never had an Amiga, but I'm fascinated by "old" computers (anything older than 3 years is ancient history, right? <grin>)

Anyway, for people looking for a slightly lower cost (but legal) solution, check out Amiga Forever, a commercial distribution of UAE that comes with *every* version of the Amiga Kickstart ROMs and Workbench disks! And this isn't a warez CD either... these are legitimately licensed from (insert current company that owns Amiga's IP). I believe it also includes some commercial software and software that will allow you to mount Amiga hard drives as network drives under Windows. Might be worth a look for former/current Amiga fans.

Anyone else find it odd that MS will be supporting DOS, Win 3.x and NT 3.5 a month longer than 95?

MS explains it (somehow):

"Windows 95 as produced for the OEM channel includes a version of Java technology that Microsoft has not been able to manufacture since March 31, 2001. Given that inventory supplies are limited, Microsoft notified OEMs in March 2001 that we would continue to license Windows 95 only through the end of November 2001."

Hmm, I thought Java wasn't too well "tied" to the OS at the time, is its removal really that hard? Couple of years ago I bought a CD-ROM of AmigaOS for emulator use, and all "third-party" stuff was removed very successfully... =)

Try here or this or better yet just look it up for yourself using google

As others have pointed out, you can't run MOL on intel based systems, but you CAN run UAE (Unix (or unstable, depends on who you talk to) Amiga Emulator) and then run a mac emulator on top of that. It's not easy, the legality is questionable and it can be slow, but it does work, I did it a few years ago for kicks.

You'll need the Amiga Forever CD (which comes with fully licenced Amiga OS ROMS and software) and a mac emulator and mac ROMS (they're out there somewhere, and instructions for extracting them (legally) from your old macs are out there too.)

There's some other bits too, like getting the Picasso96 graphics drivers running, but it's not that tough, and if you wanted I could give you a hand if you felt like taking a crack at it. I ran MacOS 7(point something) on UAE under Linux (you can run UAE under windows, too) when I had an AMDk6-2 450 and it ran fine, speedwise.

God, you'd think I was a lisp programmer or something.

From here:

An article on "LZW Data Compression" was published in the October 1989 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (see the Bibliography section for more details). A reader replied in the December issue explaining that the algorithm was patented. The author of the article added that he was unaware of any patent on the algorithm. More readers wrote, and in the March 1990 issue the editor-in-chief dedicated his Editorial to this topic, which in his words "sparked a forest of fires". The same issue also contained an official statement by Unisys Corporation, which confirmed that LZW was patented, mentioned the modem industry, and indicated how developers could contact Unisys. . (Article goes on to aledge that Unisys either was unaware or ignored the GIF issue, because they hadn't developed a formal uniform licence fee for such uses.)

It's not often that one can find evidence to back up once personal memories, but let me assure you the BBS community was aware of these issues. I also recall that Adobe announced that they had obtained a licence from Unisys at about this period. This was long before any WWW browser included GIF support.

1994 marks when the offical GIF pricesheet emerged, and the PNG project started (your ref). The fact this took 4 years backs up my point.

It's probably cheaper to find a used Amiga on ebay. Last time I checked, the going price for an A500 was around $20 + shipping. An Amiga is capable of reading & writing to 720K MS-DOS floppies - you can copy your amiga software over to 720k floppies and sneakernet it over to your PC. Another approach is to build yourself a null modem cable to connect your Amiga and PC via SLIP, PPP, or PLIP (if you want to use the parallel port). You will have to make the cable yourself - the Amiga uses a non-standard pinout on it's serial and parallel ports (Don't forget to hook up the ground!). I used a null-modem SLIP connection to copy floppy images over to my PC and burn them to a CD-ROM; it took a while but I only had to spend about $15 on the parts to make the cable.

For amiga emulation under Linux (and BSD, and BeOs, etc.), use UAE or WinUAE if you are running Windows. If you want legal Amiga ROM images (and a lot more), get Amiga Forever from Cloanto. Illegal (or at least questionable) ROM images can be found easily enough with a Google search. (The proof is left as an exersize for the student.)

I also dug up a diagram for a cable to connect an amiga floppy drive to a PC's parallel port, and a program to use with it, but i cannot seem to locate it... :(

Only other method is to get an amiga up and running, and save the files in PCDOS format, which can be read by PC's, or use a term proggy and transfer that way, or connect to a network. but since my access to my A4000 was terminated by fire and brimstone my options are limited.

i was about to recommand you using unix amiga emulator (uae for short) which is btw excellent for playing amiga games but i noticed this on their homepage:

4 x 3.5" floppy disk drives (DF0:, DF1:, DF2: and DF3:). It's not possible to read Amiga disks, so these are emulated with disk files."

there is a site here that has more info on techniques that might enable you to read those disks on pc.

Amiga was developed by a company that thought they were making the next great console. Their engineers, probably the finest design team that had ever been assembled to that point, had other ideas: they were going to make it the ultimate personal computer. Most of their development was done semi-secretly -- the people bankrolling the initial project didn't realize the feature set had expanded so enormously.

Obviously, I'm not up on all the details here, but that original seed company ran into financial trouble. Atari lent them money, knowing that they probably wouldn't be able to pay it back and they would get this incredible technology very cheaply when the little company defaulted. (I don't know if the little company was called Amiga or not.)

Well, sure enough, they hadn't quite completed their design and the loan was due -- Atari was about to move in and shut them down. Commodore rode in as a white knight and bought the company lock, stock, and barrel. They repaid Atari and took the technology for themselves. This infuriated Jack Tramiel of Atari.

To get revenge, Atari slapped together what was essentially a cheap piece of shit that, on paper, appeared to have many of the same technical merits the Amiga did. In actual fact, it was a 68000 with some RAM, I/O ports, and very simple graphic and sound chips. TOS was their single-tasking operating system. The desktop was called GEM, and was ugly and sluggish. But it had a 68000, like the Amiga, and it actually clocked the CPU faster (8Mhz) instead of the Amiga's 7.14Mhz. It also included a built-in MIDI port, which is probably the only really cool thing about it.

The Atari STs had three big advantages over the Amiga. They were cheaper, were easier to program, and were backed by a big, sleazy advertising campaign. They ran 'comparison' ads all the time which were horribly slanted. They actually did pretty well with it for quite some time. The infighting between the Amiga and ST weakened both computers, and eventually destroyed both: the PC juggernaut overwhelmed them, though the Amiga lasted a lot longer. The Amiga/Atari wars were worse than any of the distro wars you see now. But ultimately, while the Atari died a lot sooner, they both still died.

It took ten years, however, for the PC to catch up to the Amiga completely. Out of the box, it could do 4,096 colors (32 at once in low res, 4096 at once in a special HAM mode that was really hard to program for). It had sprites, four-channel digital sound, and an array of (for the time) incredibly powerful custom chips that offloaded almost all of the graphic and sound work from the CPU.

The operating system multitasked with an incredibly light overhead. You could seriously expect to run several smaller programs in 256K. 512K was quite usable, and when you expanded the machine to 2.5MB of RAM you had a really kick-butt machine.

It didn't have the concept of memory-to-disk paging, but that's probably just as well. Disk I/O was always bad on the Amigas; their filesystem really wasn't very good, and their floppies weren't especially reliable. It wasn't until you added a hard drive that they really started to sing, and most consumers couldn't afford hard drives back then.

It wasn't until 1994 that I could really multitask on my PC (with an early Linux, .8 or .9 or thereabouts) the same way that I had done on the Amiga. Linux was, in many respects, a bit like coming home again. Linux didn't really do graphics well (in a way it still doesn't: SVGALib just isn't that hot), and X was slower than dirt on the 386-16 I was running. It wasn't an Amiga replacement quite yet, but it was sure closer than Win 3.1.

My personal PC didn't rival my original Amiga for actual useful power until about 1996: considering our family bought our Amiga 1000 in Christmas of 1985, I think that's just amazing legs. I have a friend who is still using an A2000 (1987 or so) and absolutely swears by it.

At this point the original technology is hopelessly primitive and probably not worth saving, IMO. There are just too many features missing that we are all used to. The BeOS is, at present, the closest you can get to the Amiga. If you want to get back into that type of technology again, I'd suggest BeOS on a dual-CPU PC instead.

They did finally emulate the Amiga in software. There is a commercial package with ready-to-run binaries that will allow you to do almost anything you could do with a real Amiga. Check Cloanto for details. You can also, if you wish, download and assemble the pieces separately without paying for them, a la Linux.

It's worth a look. There were some cool ideas back then. The Amiga was the most technologically brilliant personal computer ever created. There are a lot of us older geeks out there who have very fond memories indeed. :-)

Yep, there's Cloanto's Amiga Forever. It works fine on my PII 266, but it feels a bit slow. It's definitely not as responsive as my A4000T and a dog compared to PPC. It's a neat thing to see, but there are some applications that don't work. Imagine for example does a wonderful job of raytracing black screens. Photorealistic black screens.

An additional note:

According to this article the IBM patent was filed before the Unisys patent. Indeed, you'll see that the original application date of IBM's patent #4814746 is 1 June 1983, whereas Unisys' patent #4558302 was first filed on 20 June 1983.

The IBM patent makes only 18 claims, as opposed to the 181 claims of the Unisys patent, and claim 7 appears to be an exact description of LZW, by my reading.

Again, i am not a lawyer...

-- ?!ng

There's a long history behind this submarine patent debacle. Sperry had the LZW patent, so now Unisys (spit) does. CompuServe waited a long time to warn everyone after they were told this is an issue, but otherwise this is really Welch's fault for publishing that article conveniently forgetting to mention the patent.