Submitted by Castle and RISC OS Open discuss there plans for the gradual unveiling of an open source RISC OS over the next twelve months. They explain their reasoning behind some of the source code restrictions in their licence. “Castle’s Jack Lillingston opened the presentation with a brief run through of his company’s products before outlining the shared source initiative – which is designed to get the source code to RISC OS 5 out into the open for free, and encourage third party developers to improve it. Steve then took over to explain more about how the project will be organised, and how they need donations to keep going.”
The lisence they outlined are so strick, what their infact asking about is having people work for them for free.
Banning new architecture ports? It’s not like ARM has a big market share anymore.
It’s not like ARM has a big market share anymore.
Err, virtually every PDA and many phones use ARM processors.
Err, virtually every PDA and many phones use ARM processors
That is true, but I dont concider the mobile market Risc OS’s targeted market. Reading up on Risc OS, its clear they target desktop users.
Also, this line (http://productsdb.riscos.com/admin/riscos.htm) made me laught;
Like all GUIs, the RISC OS Desktop has a learning curve, but once learnt, it is by far the most user friendly and productive GUI in the world today.
Dont get me wrong, but it seems they have lost touch of reality, or have been living in a cage for the last 10 years.
A shame really, becuse Risc OS had potential.
Problem is I don’t see and cheap, fast and powerful ARM based computers out there that can’t be beat in the price/performance by other CPU motherboard.
I left the Amiga and went to Intel-BeOS because I knew if BeOS did not work out (it did) that I would have a large number of options.
Looking at the Amiga market now, I knew I meade the right decision, there they have not just limited themselves to PPC, but to a limited PPC design that is now causing problems with supply. Hech, IBM makes some powerful PPC hardware and Amiga-DOS can’t even run on them.
This licence sound like a move in the same direction to me.
amiga huh?
had a look at AROS lately?
http://aros.sourceforge.net/
“Problem is I don’t see and cheap, fast and powerful ARM based computers out there that can’t be beat in the price/performance by other CPU motherboard. ”
Not as powerful as a desktop x86 machine perhaps but there is lots of nice niche hardware. PDAs, smartphones, small form factor, low power motherboards etc.
Not really… It doesn’t seem that much more restrictive than the early Apple/Darwin license, except for the porting ban.
As for the market share of ARM, it still dominates the handheld market. Imagine RISC OS running on a Nintendo DS or your palmtop. With the new license, it seems possible.
Also, the news about build of the open code being posted sound promising as it would probably be possible to use those with emulators for those who want to try the platform out but can’t really spend any money on it.
But at the same time you are applying the principles of one eco-system (Linux/GNU) to another, and that doesn’t fit. RISC OS users are already using a closed system. Just because the code is going to be partially opened, doesn’t suddenly mean that they are going to throw their arms up in the air about openess. RISC OS Users enjoy their system, open or not. The license might be restrictive, but it’s nothing outside what the community mostly want anyway. I dislike greatly the use of “if it’s not GPL it’s not good enough”.
“Banning new architecture ports? It’s not like ARM has a big market share anymore”
I love the way this gets modded all the way up 🙂
Perhaps now we’ll finally see RON (Risc OS on Psion Netbook).
Nice…
I would like to see that. All though I’d rather use Epoc32 R5 with some new apps ported instead…
But RiscOS on my Netbook would be nice.
Spelling error in the text: “their plans”?
“encourage third party developers to improve it”
As said in previous posts, this is extremely selfish..
For example, a hobby developer may want to try new ideas, ports, improvements.. that even if not very benefical to castle, it may fix or improve other aspects of the OS, or in the end, just increase the amount of developers with good knowledge of the OS (which should also be vaulable to castle). But if they make the licensing so string, they will just not appeal to that many developers, and reduce their benefit in the end..
They are too overprotective.. isnt also their business making the machines? Do you see anyone else selling Solaris, or darwing for example?
most people fear freedom. Even linux people want the restrictions of the GPL.
I know with Haiku there will be ports. Some good features will be taken into linux and closed source OS’s, I’m sure. But this doesn’t bother me because as long as the OS is complete and not just a kernel, the benefits of integration and the network effect will compel standardization and Haiku will only benefit from the unlimited experimentation and flexibility.
riscos uses a lot of assembly just for arm…so we have a rarely used OS using a rarely used platform in a rarely used language that’s hard to understand…it’s hard to see what to worry about.
The porting veto is entirely typical of the RISC OS world, though I’ll be interested to see how that appears in the license.
When the sources are owned by and license terms defined by the sole producer of one of the two hardware platforms the OS runs on, and the whole field is marginal anyway, cutting off the nose to spite the face is par for the course, I suppose.
Here’s the thing: porting RISC OS to x86 would get a whole raft of people interested in it who wouldn’t otherwise be, but it’d probably be the death knell in the hardware business. Good for the community and developers? Certainly. Good for RISC OS users? Highly likely. Good for Castle, et al? No way.
Castle also licence RISC OS to Far East SetTop makers. As the system is modular the actual desktop is just one other component that can be replaced.
How many able indy programmers are there using RISC OS? I can think of about half a dozen with a fairly high profile, but are there enough to make all of this a worthwhile exercise?
This new direction might mean that access to the platform is made easier. I’m sure that lots of OS hackers would like to a have a go with RISCOS if the cost and ease of entry were low enough.