After more than 10 years as successful Commodore/Amiga developers, in 1997 Cloanto switched to "preservation mode" and released the first version of Amiga Forever. This was followed by C64 Forever, the 8-bit complement to Amiga Forever which is rightly seen by many as "CBM Forever". Since then, our work in this field has always been done at little or no pay, and with time that was taken away from other work and personal projects. Preservation was our quiet mission long before it became a celebrated buzzword. If you are familiar with what we do and why we do it, the challenges, the white hair, and the thick skin you need to run such an effort while both abiding by the law and listening to those who find fault with doing so, you already know that we don't need to wrap the same efforts under a "nonprofit" label to feel better. We do however realize that certain formal structures, while adding bureaucracy and other complications that as a lean team we are not overly enthusiastic about, may help convey trust and move towards the goals that we have been pursuing for more than 20 years.
For these reasons, at various Commodore/Amiga events which took place between September 2014 and January 2017, we started to privately and publicly discuss possible futures involving open source, a nonprofit and/or foundation, and other long-term preservation scenarios for the legacy which we worked so passionately to keep alive. A lot of work has already been done on this front (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4), but so much more remains to be done. For now, this is only a discourse, and it needs your voice. On our side, we keep working as usual, attending community events and making things possible with the generous support of our customer-user-friends. While we already have contingency plans in place to preserve and make accessible our work in certain scenarios, one of the goals of handing over certain assets to a foundation or similar entity would be to better make it prosper during our lifetimes.
If you would like to support us in any way, or to simply express your interest in this ongoing effort, please enter your email address below. If you prefer, send us a message. Either way, we will follow up to continue the conversation.
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For additional information, please refer to Cloanto, Amiga Forever and C64 Forever.