04.Nov.2019
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Vampire team distributed pirated software during 'Vampire Standalone' launch
For years, a customized, unlicensed distribution of AmigaOS 3.9 targeting the FPGA based 'Vampire' accelerators and Amiga clones has been available on the net. The package comes with tons of preinstalled software - including hundreds of games and productivity applications that used to be distributed commercially.
Whenever people were criticizing this, Gunnar von Boehn's Vampire team was quick to point out that they were not involved with the distribution called 'Coffin' and didn't see a reason to act.
But in the days following "Amiga 34", where the 'Vampire Standalone' variant was sold to endusers for the first time, an increasing number of users reported on a1k.org that they had recieved a CF card with preinstalled Coffin OS from Gunnar von Boehn himself when purchasing their Vampire computer (screenshots (German): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).
When other users started criticizing this approach to launching a commercial product into the market - selling 32 Vampire units at a price of 550 Euros each at A34 should have generated sales of more than 17000 Euros in just a few hours - Vampire spokesman 'grond' explained that the team had to switch back to Amiga Kickstarts due to "ongoing boot problems with AROS" and had bought Kickstart 3.1 licenses from Mike Battilana (Cloanto) right at the show. Additionally, "H&P had given their OK" for the distribution of AmigaOS 3.9, according to grond (Screenshot (German)).
This would explain just a tiny fraction of the software actually contained in the Coffin distribution - the package has a total size of 32 Gigabyte and contains a complete collection of preinstalled WHDLoad games as well as many other commercial titles such as Cinema 4D, SAS/C or "Foundation Director's Cut" - but was probably meant to diffuse the main point of criticism: Pirating software still available from dealers, like AmigaOS 3.9, is generally frowned upon, even in the usually rather 'Abandonware' friendly retro community.
But due to our own conversations with Jürgen Haage from many years ago, we doubted even the claim that the Vampire team got permission to distribute AmigaOS 3.9. And approached by amiga-news.de, Mr. Haage did indeed state that he didn't know about the Vampire project and did not have any communication with the people behind it - according to him, nobody approached Haage & Partner to ask about OS 3.9.
amiga-news.de has contacted Gunnar von Boehn to ask for a statement regarding this matter and to see if he could forward our mail to 'grond', since we do not have a contact address for the latter. Von Boehn states that his team "considers the current legal situation regarding the OS as very sad" und mentions that "not even properly purchased licenses might not guarantee legal ownership" - we assume he's referring to the legal battle between Hyperion and Cloanto. Mr. Von Boehn did not address Coffin OS in his reply, but admits in a subclause that he thinks Vesalia is still selling AmigaOS 3.9. We did not recieve a reply from 'grond'. (cg) (Translation: cg)
[News message: 04. Nov. 2019, 23:55] [Comments: 0]
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