Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 13th Sep 2002 20:26 UTC, submitted by Gareth
AROS, the AmigaOS clone which is being developed by Amiga enthousiasts, and who many regard it as the real future of the AmigaOS, now includes a simple WorkBench clone. Screenshots are available.
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IMO AROS is a nice experimental and educational OS project, supported by some good developers. For many years now I check to see what is being added with every new release, but I always end up deleting AROS as it, in its current form, does not give me any additional value over for instance using 68k AmigaOS with AmigaOS XL or even WinUAE emulators. While these solutions are also less than optimal they allow me to create an environment I like to use.
IMO for high quality software development, open source development models are greatly flawed. So much is being invested into Linux with IMO far too few results. You can take the efforts by commercial software developers on Linux as an example, which almost all failed miserably. Regardless of the size of what the Linux community is said to be, i.e. Hyperion's excellent Amiga game ports like HereticII, Shogo and Freespace outsell their excellent Linux games counterparts. There is some kind of attitude problem within the Linux community which makes them believe that all (hard worked for) software should be available for free, with so many people pirating Linux commercial games.
With regard to innovative new OS developments, IMO open source models are also greatly flawed. As when someone comes up with a revolutionary new idea, such developers are unlikely to share this with the rest of the open source community. It's the difference of adding (temporary often soon forgotten) fame to your name or adding fame to your name AND making money with your ideas.
I am not saying, Linux and other open source projects are useless, no far from that. But what I am saying is that compared to commercial projects they consume too much time, efforts and money. In my view, ideally there should today be alot of commercial competitors without the allowance of creating virtually unbreakable software monopolies and in addition platform independent efforts like Java an Intent should be used to keep a high degree of compatibility between these different solutions.
IMO the most important reason why so much effort is put into open source development is because currently no such competitive commercial OS market exist.