Castle spills beans on ROL dispute - RISC OS News, Software and Information

Castle spills beans on ROL dispute

Published: 21st Jun 2004, 20:32:20GMT Source: drobe.co.uk
By Chris Williams

Page 1 of 1

Breaches and the history [Updated]

Earlier today, Castle held a press conference to answer the burning questions on their stance against RISCOS Ltd. in the recent legal dispute between the two OS developers.

After STD and VirtualAcorn released announcements that they had suspended the shipment of products employing RISC OS 4, Castle countered with allegations that RISCOS Ltd. had breached their licence with the owners of RISC OS - which as of July 2003, is Castle, after they reportedly bought the OS from Pace Micro. RISCOS Ltd. quickly responded by refuting Castle's allegations, but Castle announced that they had terminated RISCOS Ltd's licence back in May 2004.

Castle today revealed that, ever since acquiring RISC OS, RISCOS Ltd. have allegedly breached their licence to develop and sell RISC OS by: failing to pay Castle royalties from November 2003 onwards; for releasing Printers+ as open source software; and for not passing back their work on RISC OS 4 to Castle. Several sources, including a vocal RISC OS shareholder, have insisted that RISCOS Ltd. do not need to pass back their work to Castle (although, they had to for a limited period of time when Pace Micro owned RISC OS) - but Castle's solicitors, we're told, disagreed with this. Castle also argued that as they were required to protect their intellectual property (which includes the RISC OS source code), things like Printers+ cannot be open sourced.

Castle apparently contacted RISCOS Ltd. soon after they took ownership of RISC OS, and said they've spent the past 12 months asking RISCOS Ltd. to correct its apparent licence breaches. In December 2003, Castle consulted their team of lawyers to look over all the paperwork involved, to determine if and where RISCOS Ltd. had breached its licence - now, Castle seem ultimately confident that they are in the right, despite RISCOS Ltd.'s protest to the contrary.

Castle reassured us that they did not intend to make the dispute public, however it appears that STD's and VA's announcements prompted them to make a statement - indeed many commentators have suggested that getting the whole affair out in the open is what's best for the platform right now. Castle also said that they wanted to settle the dispute as quickly as possible and have the RISCOS Ltd. sub-licencees (companies that use RISC OS 4, like STD and VirtualAcorn) licensing RISC OS 3.7, an 'early' version of 4, and RISC OS 5 from Castle, so halted products can begin shipping again. Castle stressed that their aim was to move RISC OS forward, rather than appearing hostile to their competitors. They recognised the "good work" done by RISCOS Ltd.'s sub-licencees, and said that they had privately confirmed to each sub-licencee (directly or indirectly) that they meant their competitors no harm. Really.

For example, VirtualRiscPC, in Castle's view, is a good piece of software, but Castle declared that it is not an authorised RISC OS product and cannot be authorised under current licensing issues between Castle and RISCOS Ltd. However, Castle did say that they would like to work out a suitable new licence with VirtualAcorn. Castle also sent out letters from their solicitors to dealers and AMSes, 'warning' them of the dispute with RISCOS Ltd. Soon after, STD and VA announced that they've stopped shipping.

And so, we follow Human nature in search of explanations and fault. Who's exactly to blame? Castle repeatedly accused the management of RISCOS Ltd. of being indecisive and failing to communicate with Castle. Despite several meetings with Castle, no agreement was reached, and Castle claimed they had presented various deals to RISCOS Ltd. for them to consider. Castle also blamed the RISCOS Ltd. shareholders for pulling the company apart, and failing to reach a common opinion. Itself holding at least a 25 percent stake in RISCOS Ltd., Castle admitted that it would like to see the company wound up, because the company, according to Castle, is in a terminal position - while Castle believe that RISCOS Ltd. have provided a good run of upgrades for RiscPCs and similar kit, they were not sure if this will remain a viable income.

Granted, RISC OS 4 is pitched at the legacy market, but the MicroDigital Omega and of course, the popular VirtualRiscPC have helped keep RISC OS 4 sales to a level seemingly healthy enough for RISCOS Ltd. The cynical amongst you will read between the lines and guess that Castle really want people to migrate from RISC OS 4 to RISC OS 5, quite possibly via any means necessary. Castle's spin on the situation is that the market for RISC OS 4 upgrades is barely a thousand users, which for them, just isn't enough - particularly when they're talking of moving RISC OS to newer ARM architectures.

There's also no chance right now of Castle buying RISCOS Ltd. out because Castle state that they're unsure of exactly what liabilities and debts are attached to RISCOS Ltd., which they'd have to settle as the new owners. On June 12th, RISCOS Ltd. held a shareholder meeting, where Castle and their electronic design arm Tematic, showed off a presentation on where they want to take RISC OS, but only a skeleton agreement on which path to take was decided during the course of the day.

Chillingly, one suggested option was to move to have RISCOS Ltd. liquidated and have their assests sold to pay off what money they owe to Castle and other possible creditors. Also, Castle added that there was no point wasting money dragging RISCOS Ltd. to court to sue them, as Castle consider RISCOS Ltd. to be practically bankrupt, anyway.

Rumours are rife that RISCOS Ltd. believe that Castle does not own RISC OS, and it therefore does not have to pay Castle a penny - although Castle asserted that it owns all of RISC OS "lock, stock and barrel" (Castle's Peter Wild suggested you ask Pace if you don't believe them), and that RISCOS Ltd. were, according to Castle, happy to pay royalties to the new OS owners from July 2003 to November 2003. Castle went on to accuse RISCOS Ltd. of constantly stalling for time and "using every trick in the book". RISCOS Ltd. have also, according to Castle, traded solicitors' letters with Castle over the dispute.

When asked if Castle could have approached the dispute differently, Castle's Peter Wild commented that he wished they hadn't wasted so much time and money over the past 12 months apparently chasing RISCOS Ltd. to correct the alleged licence breaches; while Castle CEO Jack Lillingston added that he couldn't see how things could have been done differently.

One person described the situation as "extremely difficult", which is an understatement to be perfectly honest. The key issues are: who's right? who's read their contracts and licences right? Either way, one side has utterly screwed up a market showing signs of growth, while the other side has been grossly exploited. Which is which, out of Castle and RISCOS Ltd.?

So, whereas Castle have boldly and categorically asserted that RISCOS Ltd are in the wrong and they have breached their licence with Castle, RISCOS Ltd. have on the other hand, refuted the allegations and continued as business as usual. This is arguably bigger than the USB driver split, and bigger than the OS split. The current poll on Iconbar suggests that 51 percent of users are supporting Castle, leaving 49 percent supporting RISCOS Ltd., or are undecided.

Can either side really afford to effectively alienate half of our already tiny market? Is it the case of who has the better lawyers, or who's holding the last pair of aces? Until one side folds, or is proven wrong, or until perhaps we see for ourselves the contracts and licences at stake, this really could be a very long and painful ride.

Update at 02:32 23/6/2004
During the press meeting, Qercus editor John Cartmell questioned Castle on how much they were charging for royalties from RISCOS Ltd. The answer given was that Castle hadn't changed any pricings for authorised products, but had earlier said that VirtualRiscPC was unauthorised - read more about it here. Also, Iconbar have uploaded an MP3 of the conference, although the quality (we're told) isn't great and it's 27M in size.

Links
Castle website

This article has been linked to, or is available in the following formats:

[Printable] [Digg this] [Blog search]

CKH 21/6/04 8:40PM	"Virtual Acorn are unauthorised products ... Castle would like to see all aublicensees obtaining licences from Castle" Does this include Virtual Acorn? Or not? At present it is the only solution for a portable RISC-OS machine.
archez 21/6/04 8:52PM	This does seem like a way for Castle to get their hands on all of ROLs improvements to the Kernel, such as all the nice features in Adjust which ROS5 seems to be lacking, and to get control of all RISC OS operating system sales from legacy machines up to the Iyonix. Although this may make them into a new Acorn, surely competition between two companies, one devoting resources to legacy machines (RISC PC, A7000 etc) and one dedicated to new hardware (Iyonix) would be much better.
markee174 21/6/04 8:59PM	Competition as in 2 different versions of the software with new features which won't get used by programmers as they are not universal and a choice of faster hardware or more features on old harware/emulation?
fylfot 21/6/04 9:00PM	I'm interested that the open sourcing of !Printers has been brought up. I had often wondered about that in terms of their legal obligations to the licenser.
markee174 21/6/04 9:07PM	*In reply to Archez:* "This does seem like a way for Castle to get their hands on all of ROLs improvements to the Kernel..." I'm not sure how useful that code is likely to be to Castle. Trying to merge 2 forked versions of code without breaking lots of things is a nightmare. Probably easier to implement from scratch in most cases.
CKH 21/6/04 9:09PM	One doesn't purchase IP rights (Castle) unless one knows how a profit can be made. For example getting ROL's changes. One doesn't license IP rights (Pace) without protecting oneself against a potential competitor (ROL). One technology owner (Pace) may tolerate certain licence breaches, another (Castle) may not...
sa110 21/6/04 9:21PM	All interesting stuff. As a RiscPC owner and user of Select, I support RISCOS Ltd, however, if they are in deed in breach of license, then they have to acknowledge that fact, and do something about. On the other hand, if CTL were to purchase ROL, lock stock and barrell, surely that has got to be good for everyone. Would they then release RO5 with appropriate HAL for older machines? Or produce a budget Iyonix based workstation for those with less to spend, as a way of moving people on to RO5. Whatever happens, I think they have to be very carefull not to ailenate the last active users of RISC OS, and not to price them out of the RISC OS market.
jms 21/6/04 9:32PM	As a Select subscriber I'd have no problem if Castle were to subsume all of the Select / Adjust code and release as part of RO5 for the benefit of all future RO users. The more people have these facilities the better and more likely they are to be used. What I would object to is if Castle doing this effectively ended development of a 26 bit RO and soley concentrated on a 32 bit RO 5. I quite like getting OS updates for my machine and can't justify buying an Iyonix for that pleasure. I am puzzled about their desire to licence RO 3.7 (with its inherent FS limits) or RO 5. I can't imagine Virtual RiscPC benefitting much from either. Perhaps that's the plan? And what about the A75? If Advantage Six had wanted an embedded RO 5 they'd presumable have gone to Castle rather than to ROL for an embedded RO 4?
NoMercy 21/6/04 9:37PM	I do hope this gets tied up niecely, not sure who's on the moral high-ground, depends upon the wording of the contract that was drawn up between Pace and ROL all those years ago, to which were not privvy to, so we just have to sit and wait, though I'm not overly confident in ROL so if I was a gambling man I'd say Castle is probably in the right and it's not like theve not had quite a while to mull over the list, would be nice if Castle did buy ROL. Though castle would have to keep there licencing scheme fairly clean and open so that the cost of buying there hardware and licence seperately was the same as buying there hardware and licence together, or other companies are going to start screaming foul play.
NoMercy (-1.0) 21/6/04 9:39PM	rambles incoherently
TonyStill 21/6/04 9:43PM	Well, this is not the way I would have liked to see it happen but I think we now have some firm leadership around the OS. Castle's apparent offer of RO5 for 26-bit machines would seem to offer the convergence we desperately need. It's a bit of a shotgun wedding - I would have preferred the user features of Select* on top of the RO5 kernel - but at least it's a resolution. As to the legal issues, I suspect CKH has hit it on the head. A distracted (by unrelated problems) and disinterested PACE wasn't too worried about its RO rights (and, let's face it, the royalties are a lot more significant to a player of CTL's size than PACE's). CTL though care deeply about their core business. Here's to the RO5 route map :-/ *Rounded icons excepted
martin 21/6/04 9:49PM	The scene - a dark alley with foul smellig mist drifting around - in the distace a dog barks, a child crys - the street light flickers as you nervously move closer to the man in the dark cloak. "Psst - have you got any Adjust for sale ?"
nunfetishist 21/6/04 9:53PM	Now all we need is to hear why ROL doesn't think any of this is a problem, and a copy of the agreement between E14/Pace and ROL to be made public, as well as the agreement between Pace and CTL over the sale of RISC OS.
drjones69 21/6/04 9:53PM	Not to get too tied up into technical talk - but surely if CTL develop their 32-bit RISC OS 5 - why would this be problem to users of older machines (as indicated above) - is there any technical reason to preven CTL releasing a rom set of RO5 to RiscPC/A7000 users? Last time I checked these all had ARM processors supporting 32-bit mode. In fact (unless I am overlooking something obvious) - surely CTL will release RO for these machines - handy extra income (I for one would value a few of the enhancements of RO5, DHCP being a prime example, without needed to spend large on Select. With regard to CTL's legal statement (above) - ya gotta love the legal implications of it - ROL have to feed enhancements back to license owner - they can now either claim that RO 5 is a completely different OS to theirs, rendering their earlier complaints (about CTL not having a license for their OS) entirely moot, or they can claim RO 5 is the same OS (so they can continue to drag on their argument), but would have to turn all work on Select/Adjust over to CTL. Ah, the saga continues to develop - such excitement Regards, Ryan
sa110 21/6/04 10:01PM	So who's got the tabloid serialization rights? And how's got movie rights?
Smiler 21/6/04 10:02PM	*In reply to jms:* The A75 is a 26bit machine, therefore they went to ROL as they produce a 26bit OS. They were also developing an embedded RISC OS 4 already (as stated on the Castle website!). Castle will obviously want to lisence RO5 and not RO4 as they wantt to merge them as RO5, and legally they may not have the right to lisence RO4 to these companies. Overall, I can see this being very good at first - however, I also see an abrupt end coming to this otherwise expanding market. Castle have openly admitted to having bigger fish to fry and will no doubt drop the desktop market without the bat of an eyelid (should there be more money drawing them into a wider market). Hopefully, they still hold some dignity and know their roots, but as can be seen by many companies of the past (MS for example), when money enters the equation, interests become distorted. On the positive side, I believe Castle could easily maintain two versions of RO5, seeing as they apparently have a 26bit HAL; it is unlikely many changes will be made below the HAL and all other layers run on top of the HAL, so they can easily be ported between the two platforms. The only difference may be little incentives. For example, releasing the new 32bit version a few months before the 26bit version - important for developers. I only hope that this all resolves well for the market and the companies involved.
nunfetishist 21/6/04 10:10PM	*In reply to Smiler:* The A75 is a 32bit machine that runs RISC OS 4 in a legacy backwards-compatible mode, IIRC. IIRCA, it even boots into 32bit mode by default, and needs some stub code before the kernel to switch the CPU into 26bit mode.
arenaman 21/6/04 10:20PM	*In reply to jms:* For crying out loud. If 26bit development stops, then so what? Time to be realistic. Do you still get OS updates for your A5000? Did you still get them when the RiscPC came out? No and no. So why should the RiscPC be supported now it has been replaced? That's not the way to move forward - it's the way to stand still. To be frank, customers who don't buy new hardware aren't much use to a company whose business is selling new hardware. No-one says you should buy an IyonixPC, but you can't expect Castle to support legacy hardware when the idea is to go forward. nunfetishist: you're clearly trolling. Unless you consider yourself to be a fine moral and legal judge who has the right to see confidential documents. Since when do companies put such documents in the public domain? There is nothing to prove to anyone but the courts and lawyers.
dgs 21/6/04 10:20PM	*In reply to archez:* "This does seem like a way for Castle to get their hands on all ROLs improvements to the kernel" No, Castle said in their press briefing that it is not practical to re-merge the RISC OS 4 and RISC OS 5 kernels, even though it is practical to bring Select features to RISC OS 5, if there is ROL co-operation. dgs
Revin Kevin 21/6/04 10:21PM	But if RISCOS Ltd fed the orignal RISC OS 4 changes back to Pace, would not Castle have those with their deal with Pace? As the select changes were not RISC OS4? OR am I missing something?
nunfetishist 21/6/04 10:22PM	*In reply to Revin Kevin:* Certainly, if ROL didn't feed back changes they were required to to Pace, you'd wonder why they didn't get upset.
nunfetishist 21/6/04 10:25PM	*In reply to arenaman:* "you're clearly trolling." Quite the oppisite. If that information were revealed, then the vaste majority of this wild and mostly pointless speculation would cease. And frankly, I'd love to see that. Having all this discussion isn't helping matters, and only makes the platform look bad from the outside.
TonyStill 21/6/04 10:48PM	On a lighter note, and responding to comments in the Iconbar article (am I allowed to say that?), I was thinking of upgrading my poor aging Psion. So here's this rather tasty Palm T3 with its 400MHz XScale processor, colour 480x320 touchscreen, 64MB of RAM and WiFi; about UKP300. All it needs is a nice compact ROM-based OS that does not assume it has loads of hard drive available. Of course, it would need a HAL and not depend on 26-bit modes......
mrchocky 21/6/04 11:08PM	...and a suitable video system, and the considerable time/money/effort to do it, as well as proof of a market at a given price to make it worthwhile. Can you offer those?
Q (-1.0) 21/6/04 11:09PM	You need to divorce what Castle would like (10% of ARM processors running RISC OS and £8-10m investment) with what they've got (a dispute and no clear way of resolving it and responsibility for cancelling 3rd party licences and no product to offer them in place of their contract). As I see it the 3rd party developers have little choice but to continue to market their current products 'illegally' - if they want to remain RISC OS developers. Castle cannot offer them anything other than an 'early' RO4 as they have no access to RO Select or RO Adjust. RO5 for legacy machines is some distance off. If Castle don't offer them this way out then they will be directly responsible for destroying the RO market - although they would hold ROL to blame. What's possible is a conundrum. Castle clearly don't want to accept that it's possible to go back on the legal letters they now admit to having sent out to the developers but, at the same time, they have no proposed solution - other than hoping ROL cave in. Of course if it all worked out as Castle hope there would be a bright future for themselves (and RISC OS) and they maintain that they want (and need) 3rd party developers). Blocking the dream is ROL maintaining they have not broken their contract (according to the Drobe report) and Castle "We know we're right". With luck for all a compromise will be agreed in double quick time.
imj (-1.0) 21/6/04 11:21PM	Could someone shed light on what the hell they think they could actually spend all that money on ??!! 250 developers for a year? They're insane.
JWCR 21/6/04 11:23PM	The key detail is that Castle own 25% of RISCOS Ltd. All they need to do is persude 26% of the other shareholders to side with them. How many individuals is that? Once Castle get their support, the management of ROL will have to roll over on their back in submition to the new alpha male. End of legal hassles, end of crisis.
imj 21/6/04 11:25PM	End of decent RISC OS.
SparkY 21/6/04 11:28PM	You're clearly showing you have anti-Castle issues - it's not the end of decent RISC OS, it's perhaps the start of a stronger RISC OS. ROL's market was a dead end one, Castle's isn't.
imj 21/6/04 11:33PM	*In reply to SparkY:* So you're saying from all the junk that CTL spouted this evening, you're actually pro CTL ? Amusing.
Use the forum for more comments on this article