A very good friend of mine called Zapek was working for a company called Genesi on the development of MorphOS (a new type of Amiga Workbench for the Pegasos hardware). There has been a long story about that company because they are not paying their bills. The developers are not getting their money and it lasted too long.
After a lot of discussions together he finally agreed with me that giving up with that company and the debts they had was the best solution. He finally agreed as well that making Ambient (the user interface he was working on) GPL was probably the best solution for MorphOS as a project (not for Genesi’s business though but who cares anyway).
And it just happened yesterday ! Ambient is now Free Software and i m just shocked to see people reactions. It’s amazing to see that in the proprietary world that kind of event is just considered as “the end of the world”, while in fact it’s just giving back the knowledge and software to the user community instead of just sinking with the company…
Well anyway there are morons everywhere… The good thing is that my friend received a lot of hits and downloads on his project page (much more than the actually known number of MorphOS users), lot of donations and positive support from a lot of people.
I wish that other MorphOS developers (paid or not paid by Genesi) will follow that path for MorphOS’s sake. Having more and more parts of MorphOS released under the GPL will clearly help MorphOS to become an attractive OS and generate some successful ports to other platforms such as the Mac for example.