RISC OS cannot be saved by simply open sourcing it, said RISCOS Ltd boss Paul Middleton. He added that Castle's wish to open source RISC OS "would have no effect on RISCOS Ltd's products". Paul told subscribers over the weekend: "Making RISC OS open source, or free as some people want, is not the panacea for suddenly taking RISC OS forward. No operating system can be developed solely for free."
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Member since:2005-07-13
You're right: it does only run on ARM processors. There have been suggestions that open sourcing RISC OS might improve the ability of hardware manufacturers to promote it as a set top box platform, so maybe this would be the benefit? However, unlike the hardware manufacturers, RISC OS Ltd doesn't have this revenue stream as they're only allowed to develop desktop RISC OS.
It's interesting that you suggest Castle should offer a motherboard only version of the Iyonix. Very many people requested this (especially people living abroad I believe, to cut down on delivery costs), and eventually Castle did offer this option for a limited time: http://www.iyonix.com/iyonix/news/diy.shtml
However, the price of a complete system has now come down to almost the same price as these were sold at anyway. At any rate, the A9Home is now also much cheaper. http://www.advantage6.com/products/A9home.html
To be honest, whilst I don't disagree that the hardware is expensive compared to PCs, I'd be surprised if a cheaper RO+ARM machine could really be released. As I understand it (and it does seem plausible to me) much of the expense comes from development costs on relatively small numbers of machines (compared to your average PC). Developers who don't have the cash can already use an emulated version of course: http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/index2.htm (although personally, I don't find this as much fun!)
Member since:2006-03-19
I asked this summer castle, and got a query about the price of a "barebones" system - about 400 + something GBP , I don't remember the amount..they wrote me it was a special offer..
Of course the price was right in comparison to "full" IYONIX systeme, but I did avoid to do this..
Having a system with limited hardware compatibilty and software similarity in comparisson to other OSs is a unpleasant situation (I faced the same at the past using my Archimedes A5000)
Member since:
2006-03-19
AFIAK RISCOS runs under ARM/XSCALE only.. So who will benefit from opensourcing RISCOS? Maybe this will kill completely the R/OS... Developers need real machines - now they are TOO expensive..
If only the (few) companies that build Xscale/ARM h/dare could find an alternative way to reduce the cost, say sell only barebone (m/boad-cpu only NOT complete systems as IYONIX does..) systems..