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.
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.
Having the license drive the max sales price is a little tricky. I can't tell what you would be allowed to do if you sold them (fully or partially) populated and assembled with the right chips and components.
That might be the right answer if the creator seemed confident about IP ownership and/or was specifically showing a path to paid licenses. It's a sort of "morals clause".
Since it's very much based on Commodore's design the copyright situation seems very uncertain. The author himself seems to doubt that he can claim copyright.
Copyright situations seem pretty unclear wrt tech in general, in my personal opinion.
The OP have to place certain components for interop based on technical restrictions, other details are bound by the form factor of the components themselves. In theory none of that can be covered by copyright (nor design rights) because it's primarily technical, not artistic in nature.
You should be able to copy nearly all of a circuit board copyright free, only the artistic elements (logos, say) being reserved (and trademarks are probably the main restriction there). Patents can't encumber this.
So, really Commodore's devices _should_ be free to make technical duplicates of. YMMV.
Firmware. You can make the cloned circuit, but ROMs you'd need to have license for, I expect (this is not legal advice, it is personal opinion and shouldn't be relied on). So _working_ clones might be off the cards.
In USA you can likely dump a ROM from an original board, and that might even not be copyright in some jurisdictions under right-to-repair or similar legislation. In UK it's more than likely tortuous without a license to copy to the new board; we don't have Fair Use [and] don't have rights to format shift or backup.
Fair Use can work for commercial goods, but rarely does AFAIK (from reading caselaw).
The Amiga IP has been sold and resold many times. Some organization still owns the Amiga IP. (Does anyone know who?) There is a danger of them coming out of the woodwork and causing problems, I guess.
Wikipedia claims that Gateway owns the patents, or whoever owns Gateway now. Cloanto owns the copywright's. All Amiga related rights were transferred in 2019 from Amiga, Inc to C-A Acquisition Corporation owned by a director of Cloanto.
Back in the day, Cloanto marketed a branded version of WinUAE with the Kickstart ROMs and OS and all that. I remember always wondering if it was worth buying.
Open and gratis are two different things. This piece of hardware seems completely open to me, barring of course the unknown innards of Commodore's custom chips.
It's still open if you can get it produced for your own needs. The restrictions only apply on reselling it for profit, which is an acceptable condition.
> It's still open if you can get it produced for your own needs
No, it's not. That's just not what the term means.
> The restrictions only apply on reselling it for profit, which is an acceptable condition.
I doubt it. That would be enough to disqualify a software licence as Open Source [0], and I imagine it disqualifies a hardware project from being Open Source Hardware too [1] [2].
Someone already made a new Amiga mainboard and have been selling them, the Retro Man Cave did a series on building "The worlds newest Amiga" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECu6i6WR7
So remaking the mainboard is certainly possible, getting the custom chips seems to be much harder. The chips can't be consider that advanced anymore, so I wonder if you can get some Chinese manufacturer to duplicate them, if you had working chips for them to copy?
> The chips can't be consider that advanced anymore, so I wonder if you can get some Chinese manufacturer to duplicate them, if you had working chips for them to copy?
I believe reverse engineering the silicon still takes serious amount of money. But is it really required? Reimplementing the chips from scratch with FPGAs is a much more practical option, since everything is already pretty much documented by the simulator community.
And it appears that someone has already done something on it.
> Minimig started around January 2005 as a proof of concept by Dutch electrical engineer Dennis van Weeren. He intended Minimig as the answer to the ongoing discussions within the Amiga community on implementing the Amiga custom chipset using an FPGA. The project's source code and schematics were released under version 3 of the GNU General Public Licence on 25 July 2007.
Why even go that far? Software emulation is good enough for the vast majority of the users.
What would be very interesting would be a way to compile software emulators that have very consistent sets of rules for how hardware is expressed (such as MAME) into an FPGA.
> Why even go that far? Software emulation is good enough for the vast majority of the users.
To replace a failed ASIC on a physical Amiga (or a Amiga replica), which will be unavailable in the future. Don't forget the original topic of the article is a recreation of the physical Amiga.
It gets trickier when you need to replace one of the ASICs, but if all you want is the physical object and the user experience, without much regard for the internals, software emulation combined with support for the user-facing aspects (keyboard, mouse, screen perhaps), the approach taken by the c64 mini people with their larger breadbox model seems interesting. Having a drop in replacement for aging Amiga motherboards that can run the software and replicate the user experience without necessarily replicating the underlying hardware seems to be a good 80/20 approach.
There will be people interested in the accurate replication of the hardware. For those there is no replacement for the real thing or something very close to it.
> There are other projects like this one out there, but none of them is Open Source and none of them comes with both schematics and board. This is a big advantage, since anyone can modify the board and make new improved versions, as long as they release their modifications it with the same license. I have come up with some ideas for improvements, feel free to help :).
This is especially useful as an A500+ replacement, as the A500+ comes with one of those varta barrel batteries that tend to leak and destroy the boards.
So you will still need to source the chips, CPU won't be major issue, though denise, paula, gary and agnus from what I can tell will still be a sourcing issue. More so as they are not made and only made for the Amiga, so be harder to source.
THough as there battery on the Amiga and many old kit are known to expire in epic ways and leak all over the place, which will quickly kill the board, and depending how stored - will take out some of the chips as well. So for many this will be good for those with access to those chips, those chips will be the hard part sourcing wise if you need those.
Actually, China is often a less-than-ideal option for prototypes, unless you live in or near China.
I can't talk for the US, but in Europe where I live there are some amazingly cheap options for prototype batches. You could probably order a prototype batch (2~3 boards) for around 150 euro with a 7 day delivery. Ordering from China from EU will probably take around a month to arrive.
Hmm, I can get a 4 layer board the same size as the a500 motherboard in quantities of 5 in 2 weeks for £100 delivered, European suppliers seem to be nearly that for a single board even with prototype specials?
It may be useful for smaller pcb's and a fast turnaround, but given everything at the moment, is anyone really in a rush?
Any you'd suggest in particular? I often find it cheaper to get 10 boards made in China than to get 1-2 made anywhere near remotely local. (And DHL from China isn't a lot slower than DHL from Germany)
Germany isn't a bad place to get 100 - 1,000 PCB's of this magnitude made .. perhaps you'd be better off doing the hardware assembly in Hungary or Croatia right now, albeit for the current cruise notwithstanding, of course ..
The terms even become more restrictive as the Euro inflates!