I'm not going to beat about the bush here, as much as I appreciate the work that has gone into AROS, and admire the dedication of those behind it, AROS has become stagnant and is frankly almost as useless as it was 5 or 6 years ago. Sure there has been progress, but that progress has been directionless and of no benefit for most of the Amiga community.
I'm not posting here to beat on the AROS developers. I'm here to be constructive and put forward a proposal of how things could be resolved. However, the first obstacle in the way of anything happening is to get the core AROS guys to acknowledge that there is a problem, and that THEY need to do something about it. That is why I have to be so blunt in the post about the dire state things are in. AROS is currently stuck between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the lack of binary compatibility and the hard place is the restrictions imposed by source compatibility. Hiding behind the APL just isn't going to cut it anymore.
My proposal is simple: Fork the AROS project into 2 distinct projects, each with a different technical focus and target audience. For the purposes for distinction, I'll refer to them as 'Classic' and 'Future' here. This is by no means my suggestion for naming.
Let's start with Classic. The Classic project's main aim would be 3.1 binary compatibility. The primary target platform would be *UAE, with real physical 68k machines the secondary target. Strip out anything that isn't needed to run in UAE - drivers etc. There are plenty of improvements that Classic could provide over OS3.1. It could be then used as a base for distribution builders such as AmigaSYS, AmiKit and ClassicWB to add value to.
With the Classic project handling the compatibility side of things, the Future project can concentrate on making something a bit more modern. No more skirting around Memory protection with small bits here and there. Full MP is now possible. All those 1980's restrictions are lifted, and the developers can concentrate on making something Amiga-like rather than Amiga compatible. Compatibilty might be added later through a sandbox technique utilising Classic as a hosted OS or even simply using classic under E-UAE, which seems to be the direction the core AROS team have favoured before.
Freeing Future should hopefully spark a bit more interest from outside the community. It appeared to me that one of the reasons certain Devs have left the project is that the Amiga restrictions have prevented them from building the OS they wanted.
Before going into a big more detail, I just want to be honest here. In this scheme of things, I favour Classic over Future. It would fulfil my personal Amiga needs. Also, while I'd sell an elderly relative to get my hands on a modern Amiga-like system, I don't have faith that it would happen. All new OSes, especially those of an OSS variety always seem to end up being just another unix-a-like. This has even happened to OS4 in certain places (thankfully outside the core system).
Back to Classic, I would propose taking a similar approach to the MOS team in getting the project going. There really needs to be momentum from the start. Start off as simply a bunch of replacement files that goes on top of an OS3.1 install and keep building them up until you have replaced everything. Make sure that this can be done easily and painlessly (see AIAB) and you're sorted. People want to use stuff now, not when it's done. Providing a fully function system from the start is key here. Really, it's how AROS should have been done from the start.
I guess that about covers it. Although it's great that MOS and AOS are still progressing, the whole community/market/whatever-you-wanna-call-it is far too fragile for anything other than an open source operating system at the heart of it. We really need AROS to do well.
Sorry for the extra-long post.
