“There still seems to be plenty of interest in building shared-source RISC OS for the Risc PC, but there is much confusion about what would be involved in doing so. First, understand that this is not top priority for ROOL – ROOL’s policy is that it’s more important to focus on releasing all the components needed to do an Iyonix ROM and disc build first. Only after this will the remaining components be vetted for release, although those components that relate to Risc PC hardware support are probably good candidates to be the next on the list.”
Why are there so many complaints on the price of Vista, and that you can’t keep the old XP license if you upgrade?
Everybody knows that Windows costs money, it have always cost money and it will probably will continue to cost money in the foreseeable future. For that money you get a very good OS with a large user base that makes it easy to collaborate with other people, and have a very large pool of available third party applications. Why complain?
The problem seam to be that in the past people have used pirate versions of windows and god knows what other software titles. Now all of a sudden Microsoft wants the money they are entitled to, and introduce ways to enforce their licenses.
For people that don’t want to pay there are free alternatives such as Linux. Unfortunately they may find that their favorite applications are not available. No wonder they are not available. What software company waste money on porting their apps to an OS that have round 1% of the market.
If the people that want their OS to be free of charge, actually had used a free OS like Linux instead of a pirated Windows, chances are that Linux had had a user base large enough for e.g. Adobe to profitably support Dreamweaver or Photoshop on Linux, and that we would have had a working software market where the people who wanted Vista Ultimate could buy it at a reasonable price.
Right now Microsoft can charge almost any price as the process of moving to Linux is too costly to many companies. Linux in itself may be free but learning new apps or developing new ones are not.
One wonders what the RISC OS people’s stance on using free builds of RISC OS as the basis of fee-free RISC PC emulation… Actually the possibility of that could be one reason why they’re policy is currently “Iyonix code only”
At the moment, we do not know the full nature of the licence, so we’ll need to wait and see, however, Castle have said that basically, if someone makes money out of RISC OS, they’ll want a licence fee. So I guess that means if you use the commerical RISC OS emulator, then they’ll get some money, if you use one of the free ones, they likely will not get any money. But then, they were not getting any money out of that anyway.
As far as I know, there will be no legal barrier to making RISC OS 5 run on the RiscPC, or any other ARM hardware, and by extension, ARM hardware emulators.