Hyperion Entertainment - AmigaOS 4

AmigaOS 4

See also: History of the AmigaOS 4 dispute

In 2001 Hyperion announced that, after licensing the rights from Amiga, Inc, it would be working on the long-awaited successor to AmigaOS 3.9, and to this end concentrated most of its effort on the development of AmigaOS 4. Hyperion claimed and still claim that it is based upon AmigaOS 3.1 source code, and to a lesser extent certain AmigaOS 3.9 sources. A quick port of 68k AmigaOS to PowerPC was originally planned, with new features added as development continued. Ben Hermans, writing on Amiga forum Ann.lu, claimed that these sources, along with the source of the PPC kernel WarpOS would be sufficient to provide a version to users within a year, making his now-infamous "change some flags and recompile" comment.

AmigaOS 4.0 was first released to end-users and second level betatesters in October 2004, with AmigaOS 4.1 following in September 2008. It is currently still in development.

The first Managing Partner of Hyperion, Benjamin Hermans, in the period between announcement and release of AmigaOS 4, ignited a great deal of community controversy by repeatedly claiming that MorphOS, an AmigaOS-like competitor (which had been released in complete form in 2003), was illegal, and had on several occasions threatened to take legal action against it either on the grounds that it was parasitic competition to AmigaOS 4, or even that it was actually based on stolen AmigaOS source code. No evidence to support either claim ever became public, neither did any legal action against MorphOS take place, although neither prevented such views being repeated commonly in public Amiga forums and mailing lists and even accepted as fact by some. This situation was inflamed by ex-Commodore engineer Dave Haynie, who backed up Herman's claims, though again without any evidence.

The dispute did not enter the courts, but in the forums the argument was bitter. Hermans claimed that Bill Buck leading the Genesi company funding MorphOS was a "con-artist".

Evert Carton took over the Managing Partner position after Benjamin Hermans stepped down in mid-2003, for unstated reasons.

In 2007, Hyperion were sued by Amiga Incorporated for trademark infringement in the Washington Western District Court in Seattle, US. Amiga, Inc. sued Hyperion for breach of contract, trademark violation and copyright infringement concerning the development and marketing of AmigaOS 4.0, stating that Hyperion had continued to develop and market AmigaOS 4 without paying agreed royalties and had continued to do so even after warned to cease and desist.

Hyperion launched a counter action, claiming fraud in Amiga, Inc. handling of Amiga intellectual properties and debts, including the use of debt-holding shell companies, by shifting responsibility between these shell companies. They also claimed that Amiga, Inc. had failed to uphold their part of the contract and had been untruthful in correspondence; and that they had failed to deliver the AmigaOS 3.1 source that AmigaOS 4 was developed from, forcing Hyperion to find it elsewhere. In defiance of that ongoing legal dispute, in late September 2007 Hyperion published, distributed and marketed a standalone version of AmigaOS 4 for classic Amiga, an action Amiga, Inc. claimed as illegal.

On May 29, 2007, the new Managing Partner generated his own controversy by stating under oath that the open-source AmigaOS reimplementation AROS was "probably illegal", as documented on page 27 of court documents related to the Amiga-Hyperion court case. Once again no evidence was provided to back up this claim.

In 30 September 2009, the US courts forced Hyperion and Amiga, Inc into settlement. As grounds for the settlement, Hyperion were granted an exclusive right to develop and market their OS and subsequent versions with the name AmigaOS. However, the "Amiga" trademark remained with Amiga, Inc. and was then also sold to other parties, including Commodore USA and iContain. This meant that "Amiga" branded hardware could and would be sold without AmigaOS 4, weakening the claim of AmigaOS 4 as being a true successor to AmigaOS as originally developed by Commodore-Amiga.

On April 24, 2011 Evert Carton announced stepping down as the managing partner of Hyperion. Since the departure of Evert Carton, the current management of Hyperion has not been made public.