Just as a reminder, Barry Altman started to use the trademark Commodore for his company name and on websites a long time before he eventually finalized a licensing agreement. He later attempted to justify this highly questionable behaviour as a strategy to find out who the current owners of the trademark were.
I had a long conversation with Barry on this. There was no way to contact the owners of the name "Commodore". If you research this you will see it is true. It was a strategic strategy to get their attention and it worked. You may not have heard but some time after Barry got a license, ultimately he secured the name Commodore (though last I heard there may have been some legal wrangling, I haven't been following).
Commodore USA have also been repeatedly caught using third-party artwork on their website without proper licensing from the original authors.
I never agreed with Barry on this and told him so. He was trying to get Kommunity interest by doing this. This issue alone though did not justify the venom he received.
Plus, the company made claims about a 30 million dollar advertizing budget which were completely and utterly false.
It was indeed false. Later on he claimed this was at the advice of the advertising people he had hired. While $30M was false, there clearly was some big bucks spent on advertising early on. To be vetted and become an advertising partner with Disney takes money. To get the type of media coverage he had a few months before the launch of the C64x take serious money. The news story peaked at #1 on Yahoo trends and was on every major news site and tech website. That doesn't come free.
Last but not least, the company attempted to lure members of the AROS community into supporting Commodore USA hardware for free. When asked to contribute financially to AROS bounties as a good-will gesture, the interest in AROS suddenly dropped and Barry insulted the very same OS project that Commodore USA had praised and had announced to be a key part of its future software strategy shortly before.
I really don't think this is true. He did dismiss AROS later on, but IIRC the option had been eliminated due to legal issues from the Amiga Inc / Hyperion settlement. He couldn't use an Amiga-like OS on a computer branded "Amiga".
You didn't have to like the guy, but the venom he received in the forums was too much. The reason behind the venom was largely due to teh name(s).
Back on the money issue, Barry was a wealth man. If you look at the list of Madoff victims, Barry S. Altman is near the top. The money he recouped from the settlement and of the claw-back of Madoff's assets is more than most people would see in a lifetime. Barry could personally finance CUSA as much as he wished.