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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

As an outsider looking in for some reason this seems endemic to the Amiga community more than other retro systems. On the Atari ST even though it is a smaller community we have a completely open source GPL implementation of the operating system plus (EmuTOS) extensions for it (FreeMint, fVDI, etc.), and several hardware projects etc. with pretty open communities, if less of them.

On the Amiga side every project seems to have licensing which seems to always be defined such that someone thinks they're going to make a successful commercial project out of it Any Day Now. It's strange.

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Yes! In my observations (also as a relative outsider), it has been like this at least from the early 1990s. Every little itty-bitty program for the Amiga cost money.

I am also reminded of how Carl Sassenrath thought it would be a good idea to release Rebol under only a proprietary license. The Rebol project, which initially had (IIRC) enormous hype and mindshare during development, tanked, and I think this was large reason why. This is despite the time being just right for a new good scripting language: PHP and Python were just beginning, and Perl was slowly dying.

(Rebol was eventually released under an Open Source license in 2012, when nobody cared about Rebol anymore.)

Tangentially, I had to argue on a very popular Amiga forum that a guy that ported some GPL licensed software to the system should also release the source he built his binaries from, all while several users were openly mocking me for even suggesting it. It wasn't a piracy friendly forum either. They'd vigilantly delete links that could lead you to 35 year old Kickstart ROM images, and merely suggesting that someone download a cracked copy of some game they already owned was frowned upon. It can be a very strange community depending on where you look.

That said, I don't mean to say that I think the licensing terms of this project are unfair. It seems reasonable if you believe you owe a lot of your work to someone else that you want it to generate some public good that will benefit everybody.

It just how the community is. I've spent far too much money on my Amigas and almost everything costs a fair bit. TBH though when projects are successful they do tend to do quite well (the new Amiga 1200 cases must have sold a fair bit, and the vampire 2 cards). If you go to the Amiga meetups there are loads of people there. I don't think anyone expects them to become super-wealthy.

Considering the machines are now ancient and people put a lot of effort in to keeping the hardware relevant, I personally don't mind paying the extra.

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