The rights are split off between four companies:
- Amiga Inc. (who hold some Amiga trademarks)
- Cloanto (makers of Amiga Forever and license holders of AmigaOS up to 3.1)
- Haage & Partner (developers of AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9)
- Hyperion Entertainment (developers of AmigaOS 4.0 and 4.1)
Hyperion Entertainment also had their own share of headaches as well during the development of AmigaOS 4.0, which took years to settle in court.
And because of this mess with licensing, Cloanto can not legally sell people copies of the later AmigaOS 3.5 or 3.9 with Amiga Forever. And AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 are both long out of print and hard to get copies of, AFAIK.
So what should be done with this gigantic wreck of a license? Simple.
RE-LICENSE THE ENTIRE AMIGAOS CODE. ALL OF IT. EVERY VERSION.
Make the entire kit 'n kaboodle F/OSS. Put it all under a license like the BSD license and you can have it be permissive enough to study and still be commercially viable. Or hell, the MIT license works, too! Get Haage & Partner to stop sitting on their thumbs and do the same for Amiga OS 3.5 and 3.9! They can make money on support!
Merge the 3.x codebases. Allow MorphOS and AROS to use code from them to improve their OSes. Allow AmigaOS 4.x to use it! Have a company that would act as a Canonical or a Red Hat for AmigaOS: handling of licenses, financing coders to work on the OS, source code repository management, and support. Grab all the splinters and make it all a whole!
It's 2017, and the Amiga community is stronger than ever! But in order to continue to remain strong, the companies behind the Amiga need to also get on the ball and understand what it is the community asks! Opening the source code up for AmigaOS will allow the platform to grow and thrive; it would be a massive win-win to everyone involved! There's literally no real reason why this shouldn't happen!
The Amiga never deserved to be thrown to the ground and forgotten. And we should never allow that outcome.