© 1997-2006
Gareth Knight
All Rights reserved
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Why did Gateway buy the Amiga?
For two years no one knew why Gateway had bought the Amiga. The
majority opinion indicated that the purchase was purely for the
patents rather than through any decision that the Amiga should be
bought back from the dead. Dave Haynie, former Commodore engineer
and now working at Met@box illustrated this on the Team AMIGA
mailing list.
Opinions vary, but clearly, the $4M they plunked
down was worth it just for the patent portfolio. Patents are
important bargaining chips in these lawsuit-crazy times, as well as
for more mundane things, like signing cross-licensing deals rather
than paying cash for the use of some "invention" (in these days of
serious numbers of bogus patents, I use that term loosely).
Gateway, doing none of their own development, was particularly at
risk.
Two years after the purchase Carl Sassenrath revealed what had led
Gateway to buy the Amiga. In an interview with Linux World he
commented,
"The technology which was sold to Gateway was
primarily a deal to buy the patent on the 2-button mouse... That is
why Gateway bought Amiga -- but then they got... thousands of
emails asking if they were going to relaunch the Amiga. So they
figured, 'why not?'"
So Commodore had the patent on the two-button mouse all along. Who
would have guessed that the old giant owned the patent for such a
common computer tool?
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