Open Source Amiga OS

[ElPolloDiabl]

You can download individual upgrades from Aminet. Or if you want the whole thing free, wait for AROS.

Open source is great, it means no one can ever shelve it and abandon it. Like what happened to Amithlon.

If your asking... Could you buy OS 4.1 and Amithlon and sell them both at $20 with no hardware lock in?

[kolla]

The same reason that Amiga OS 3.9 won't run on a 68000 with 512K RAM.

In short, C vs Assembly.

If you build a 3.1-alike setup with almost only 3.9 components, what would you call that?

http://kolla.no/minimig/

[nicholas]

If you build a 3.1-alike setup with almost only 3.9 components, what would you call that?

http://kolla.no/minimig/

I'd call it a "3.1-alike setup with almost only 3.9 components" running on an A500 with 1.5MB Chip RAM and a 16MHz 68000.

[Iggy]

Hahaha, you don't know freetards do you.

Baffles me. AROS is  already free. And how closed can it be?
Its got a multitude of developers.
Only the two primary PPC variants of the OS3.1 API are closed.

[nicholas]

Also AROS isn't just two decades old, there's lots of new stuff there too. So it's as useful as any of the three AmigaOS 3.1 clones.

I wouldn't go that far, but it's getting there.

[commodorejohn]

Baffles me. AROS is  already free. And how closed can it be?
Its got a multitude of developers.
Only the two primary PPC variants of the OS3.1 API are closed.

See, freetards don't think that way. In the Gospel According to Stallman, all proprietary software is capital-E Evil, and the goal of all software is (obviously) to metamorphosize into a Free Software Alternative, probably with four different variants depending on whose UI toolkit is the Free-est at the moment, two separate Windows ports for the poor benighted peons stuck on Proprietary Software, and eleven abandoned forks, at least one of which was an attempt to "integrate social media features."

Thus saith Lord Stallman!

[paul1981]

Hello everyone. I have been silently watching this web space for quite awhile and only recently decided to jump back into the conversation with the hopes of an A1200 purchase from Petro T. in July.

That's good news... the more Amiga users the merrier! The A1200 is a fine machine as well, so I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

[Iggy]

See, freetards don't think that way. In the Gospel According to Stallman, all proprietary software is capital-E Evil, and the goal of all software is (obviously) to metamorphosize into a Free Software Alternative, probably with four different variants depending on whose UI toolkit is the Free-est at the moment, two separate Windows ports for the poor benighted peons stuck on Proprietary Software, and eleven abandoned forks, at least one of which was an attempt to "integrate social media features."

Thus saith Lord Stallman!

One of the advantages to a proprietary systemi is that decisions get made by a small, more cohesive group.
So far I have good experiences with the decisions the MorphOS development team has made.
I'm typing this on a MorphOS system right now.

[Terminills]

I wouldn't go that far, but it's getting there.

Guess it depends on what you're using it for.    3D Games Aros wins hands down.  Web browsing I would go for morphos. Retro fun Classics or Winuae for me.  as for Aos4 well I don't know enough to judge there.

[persia]

@commodorejohn

If you love closed source you must be an Apple fan....

[Iggy]

@commodorejohn

If you love closed source you must be an Apple fan....

Which is based on FreeBSD which is fairly open.

More so than Amiga OS.

[commodorejohn]

@commodorejohn

If you love closed source you must be an Apple fan....

You need to take remedial set theory. There are how many closed-source OSes out there? For all you know I could be a fan of BeOS, OS/2, or (*gasp*) Windows.

Actually, I don't love closed-source so much as I have been quite forcefully disillusioned from buying into the FSF propaganda that open-source is magic pixie dust that makes everything better unilaterally and has no disadvantages whatsoever. Comes from multiple attempts over a solid seven years and change to try and get a really usable, pleasant user experience out of any of the eleventy billion mutually-incompatible Linux distros.

I do like Haiku as it's shaping up, but then Haiku takes the unorthodox but eminently sensible approach of allowing open access to the source but forbidding forking, so you actually get a single cohesive user experience.

[slaapliedje]

See, freetards don't think that way. In the Gospel According to Stallman, all proprietary software is capital-E Evil, and the goal of all software is (obviously) to metamorphosize into a Free Software Alternative, probably with four different variants depending on whose UI toolkit is the Free-est at the moment, two separate Windows ports for the poor benighted peons stuck on Proprietary Software, and eleven abandoned forks, at least one of which was an attempt to "integrate social media features."

Thus saith Lord Stallman!

I always find it funny that people think Stallman actually says these things.  I guess it's akin to Christians saying that Jesus said to kill everyone who didn't think he was God or Son of God or whatever.

Stallman himself has said that there are use cases where proprietary software is understandable, but nothing he'd really use.  But then he also makes a difference between proprietary and closed source.  I tend to agree with him that even if it's proprietary software, the source code should be available to the users for auditing purposes (at the very least).  How much easier would it be to debug crashes in Windows if we could get reports saying "Dll crashed in function blah of line blah" or something.  I have been able to track so many issues down and fix them, or work around them simply because of this with (for example) php scripts, etc.  

AmigaOS is horrible at this too "Error in ramlib #8000004" what the crap is that?  Fortunately in this day and age we have the Internet to look that up.  Anyhow, I always find it funny when people are calling others things like 'freetard' even though for the most of the part the ones who are all up in everyone's faces about 'Free' software (mind you Stallman also states that Free Software and Open Source Software are not the same thing, though they overlap at times) are really trying to look out for software freedoms and really if they had started sooner, maybe the AmigaOS wouldn't be in such a horrible state right now with 3 different offshoots of the 3.x line, all with different hardware requirements.

If there had been enough 'freetards' at Commodore when they were going bankrupt, maybe they could have 'leaked' the source code Online then we could have had cross platform Amigas everywhere!  

That could have changed the whole scene.  Well, perhaps except for the fact that most of AmigaOS was written in Assembly and C, which is completely alien to most younger programmers.  Most of the people I talk to these days say that the only thing they learn in college is basic C (rarely) and Java.

slaapliedje

[nicholas]

You need to take remedial set theory. There are how many closed-source OSes out there? For all you know I could be a fan of BeOS, OS/2, or (*gasp*) Windows.

Actually, I don't love closed-source so much as I have been quite forcefully disillusioned from buying into the FSF propaganda that open-source is magic pixie dust that makes everything better unilaterally and has no disadvantages whatsoever. Comes from multiple attempts over a solid seven years and change to try and get a really usable, pleasant user experience out of any of the eleventy billion mutually-incompatible Linux distros.

I do like Haiku as it's shaping up, but then Haiku takes the unorthodox but eminently sensible approach of allowing open access to the source but forbidding forking, so you actually get a single cohesive user experience.

What makes you think the Haiku licence forbids forking? It's MIT licenced which is even more permissive than the GPL.  You can literally do whatever the hell you want with it, including refusing to release the source to your own changes.

We've been here before John, your problem with the *nixes is that you don't know how to use UNIX to do what you want to do, nothing to do with the licencing model of the code*. Different strokes for different folks.....

There's a big difference between Free Software as defined by the FSF and Open Source as defined by the OSI too.

*Correct me if I'm wrong but you'd be just as baffled by the closed and proprietary HP/UX and AIX as you are by GNU or OpenBSD.

[commodorejohn]

What makes you think the Haiku licence forbids forking? It's MIT licenced which is even more permissive than the GPL.  You can literally do whatever the hell you want with it, including refusing to release the source to your own changes.

I could be wrong on that, it's what I recall being told but I'm not 100% sure. In any case, there aren't Haiku forks, so there's still no confusion over which of a multiplicity of distros is good for what; there's just Haiku.

We've been here before John, your problem with the *nixes is that you don't know how to use UNIX to do what you want to do, nothing to do with the licencing model of the code*.

*Correct me if I'm wrong but you'd be just as baffled by the closed and proprietary HP/UX and AIX as you are by GNU or OpenBSD.

I love how "doesn't like *nixes" automatically equates to "doesn't know how to use them." I know perfectly well how to find my way around Unix derivatives; the fact that Linux distros are plagued by terrible UI, nightmare depency trees, and a "who cares if it works so long as it's free" attitude has little to do with the basic Unix architecture (which is old and crufty, but fundamentally workable) and even less to do with confusion on my part.

But no, it must be that I'm just some poor benighted soul meddling in things I can't possibly understand, because there's no way my grievances could be legitimate just because Linux software developers neither know nor care what makes a good, cohesive user experience.

And I've never used HP/UX or AIX. From my limited experience with Solaris, I can say that that at least is a significant improvement in terms of consistency and intuitiveness in the user interface, though that may be down more to the Common Desktop Environment, I dunno.

There's a big difference between Free Software as defined by the FSF and Open Source as defined by the OSI too.

Yes, there is. OSI doesn't care about whether the product is good because it can probably be fixed later, at some point indefinitely far into the future and possibly not until after World War III, while the FSF doesn't care about whether the product is good because who cares if it's good when it's a Free alternative, why don't you just go back to your Micro$haft masters you backwards ingrate Uncle Tom!

[psxphill]

I could be wrong on that, it's what I recall being told but I'm not 100% sure. In any case, there aren't Haiku forks, so there's still no confusion over which of a multiplicity of distros is good for what; there's just Haiku.

There are no AROS forks or Linux forks either.
 
Linux is the kernel, the distro is not Linux.
 
There are several AROS distros, although usability wise they are pretty much the same.