Recent History

2019-2020: From Amiga, Inc. to Amiga Corporation

On February 1, 2019, Amiga Corporation completed the purchase of the Amiga assets [277][292]. The company was originally incorporated as C-A Acquisition Corp., and its CEO is Mr. Mike Battilana, who also serves as CEO of Cloanto.

While stating [292] that the new Amiga entity would keep a "low profile" until the resolution of the outstanding legal cases, Mr. Battilana also commented [293] about the different roles of Cloanto and Amiga: "After the demise of Commodore/Amiga, Cloanto still wanted to celebrate and support Amiga. This was done by the book, working with Amiga and not wanting to replace it. Amiga as a company would have a different role at that."

More details to be added as the situation evolves.

Profile: Cloanto

This section was originally expanded when it appeared that Cloanto would be the acquirer of the Amiga assets in 2019. Since then, it was made clear in public [293] and in personal email exchanges that all Amiga assets, including ones previously owned by Cloanto, would be assigned to the new Amiga Corporation once the legal cases were resolved. Given the "low profile" that Amiga has chosen to keep [292], and since the past activities and statements of both Cloanto and its CEO Mr. Mike Battilana (who then became CEO of Amiga) are a major source of information and hints about the potential future steps of Amiga, this part is nevertheless being retained for the time being.

Having its roots in Commodore 8-bit systems, Cloanto was one of the original software developers for the Classic Amiga platform, for which it had been creating productivity applications like Personal Paint and Personal Write "since the 1980s" (per web and social media pages).

Like other developers who owe their initial success to the Amiga, in the mid-1990s Cloanto diversified into software and services outside of the Amiga platform. As "kolla" wrote in a 2020 Amiga forum post [320], "Cloanto has a life and business outside of Amiga shenanigans, the Amiga activities are a side 'hobby project' of Mike. Unlike Hyperion, which only exists as a shell company for Amiga related activities." In the same discussion, "amigadave" added: "At least the owner of Cloanto knows how to write a bit of code. The only thing that the owner of Hyperion knows how to write is legal documents and how to screw people out of their money and time."

In 1997 Cloanto published, with the blessing of Gateway, the first version of Amiga Forever, a legal and official Amiga emulation package. While releasing new versions of Amiga Forever, Cloanto also continued to work with both Amiga Washington [32] and Amiga Delaware [115].

The Amiga Forever documentation [245] states "The Amiga Forever package is published by Cloanto IT srl ('Cloanto IT'), including items under license from Cloanto Corporation and other licensors." Cloanto IT srl is an Italian corporation, which according to public records [246] was founded in 1987 and is owned 90% by Mr. Mike Battilana, who is also the CEO. Cloanto Corporation is a Nevada, USA, corporation. Ownership details of the latter do not appear to be public record.

In sharp contrast to the public battles between the Amiga companies and Hyperion Entertainment, it became known only in 2011 that behind the scenes Amiga Delaware and Cloanto had been engaged in negotiations over some trademark matters since 2007 [216][217]. According to documents published by the USPTO [218][219], Amiga Delaware and Cloanto reached an agreement in early 2011. Unlike the settlement agreement between the Amiga companies and Hyperion Entertainment, which was published by the court [138], the agreement between Amiga Delaware and Cloanto appears to have remained private. Possibly as part of this agreement, according to documents published by the US Copyright Office [220][225] Amiga Delaware assigned to Cloanto the Commodore-Amiga copyrights it had registered in its name (except for newer works such as AmigaDE and AmigaAnywhere). In agreement with Amiga, US trademarks like "Amiga Forever" and "Workbench" also became registered in Cloanto's name [7].

In 2012, while announcing a license that would allow Amiga to publish games for Research in Motion (Blackberry) devices, Cloanto CEO Mr. Mike Battilana appeared to take a rare public stance [312] against the actors that had supported the lawsuits against Amiga: "These have been challenging years for Amiga. While others were staging or funding attacks against Amiga, we are grateful for having been able to always work by the side of all Commodore/Amiga companies since the 1980s. We will continue to celebrate and support Amiga."

At the Saku 2014 event in Finland Mr. Mike Battilana described [229] how the 1997 agreements opened the door and "allowed to build on that license and later slowly acquire some things". When former Commodore and Amiga manager Mr. Petro Tyschtschenko asked what he thought about a Linux-like open source model for the Amiga OS, Mr. Mike Battilana cited the legal work that Cloanto had already been doing to make such an option possible, adding that more work needed to be done.

At the end of December 2015, Austrian self-proclaimed "hacktivist" Mr. Bernhard R. Fischer gave a speech titled "The Ultimate Amiga 500 Talk" [236] at the 32th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany. At about the same time as the speech, during which Mr. Bernhard R. Fischer cited his own past as a "cracker" and "spreader", the proprietary source code of Amiga OS 3.1 was leaked to that same event's file sharing network, and immediately became public [237]. Analysis of this leaked source code revealed how Cloanto had contributed to the Amiga operating system as far back as 1993 [230], leading to some speculation on whether it could use this status in relation to the complex legal proceedings between Hyperion Entertainment and the Amiga parties, and in the context of an open source scenario.

Between 2016 and 2017, Cloanto added some details about "possible futures involving open source, a nonprofit and/or foundation, and other long-term preservation scenarios" to its cloanto.org page [238]. In what seemed like a response to this, Hyperion Entertainment director Mr. Timothy De Groote stated that "We cannot legally support this. Once it is open source, this is an irreversible decision that is beyond the scope of our license under the Amiga Inc. Settlement Agreement." [240].