After hearing the news that videos from the recent RISC OS London Show are now available online, leading RISC OS news website – The Icon Bar decided to take a look at what RISCOS Ltd had to say in their presentation. They found some quite shocking results which point to RISCOS Ltd having lost their way.
I have just watched the RISCOSOpenLtd.mpg
RISCOS should be placed under the GPL, LGPL or BSD licence and then development will at least have a chance of continuing.
Castle should attempt to make better products and RISC OS Open should work with them to support their products as completely separate entities (A bit like how Ubuntu works with Dell (That may not be the best example)).
Edited 2009-11-08 16:59 UTC
For the record, Castle’s branch of the OS is already under a shared source license (a less restrictive one than Microsoft’s, BTW – IIRC, it boils down to “do what you want as long as you’re not selling it, you share the changes, you credit us, and you give us an unlimited license to it,”) with some GPL, BSD, and dual-licensed Castle/BSD code mixed in.
And, as for Castle “making better products,” the market is too small to do that. Any “better products” they’d make would be in so low volumes, you’d be able to buy a few Core i7 rigs and have money left over… for the cost of one custom-designed for RISC OS single-core ARM box.
Any new hardware that RISC OS will run on, from here on out, will be designs meant for other purposes, mainly those intended to run Linux.