"Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"

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Open sourcing 3.1? What would be the good of that? It's been obsolete for decades. Plus the 3.1 sources have already been floating around the net for years, no one has done anything much useful with them.

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You're dodging the actual question. Let's ignore the lack of Reaction and say 3.9 and 3.1.4 are the same - that still leaves Amiga OS 3.1.4, AmigaOS 3.X, AfA OS 4, AROS 68k and BoingBag 4 plus the individual patches and libraries released on the Net. The existence of all these branches did not stop you from releasing 3.1.4, did it? So where's the limit before we loose you? Five, six, seven branches?

BB3&4 is not really a "branch" of the OS. It is basically just a collection of bug fixes and optimizations. It does not introduce any incompatibilities. There are no new APIs, and no software that requires it to run.

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at the moment the main activity is to make it as compatible to 3.1 as possible (f.e. changes in keymaps and datatypes at the moment)

After 25 years of development it is still not a full implementation of 3.1.

So can we expect to see 3.2 support by the year 2045?

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I wish I was joking, I'm actually being serious though. Extrapolating from past development, that seems about the right timeframe.

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BTW why do you think Aros 68k developers have the desire to imitate the features of 3.2 (like Reaction)

So that modern AmigaOS software will run on it, presumably. Otherwise AROS will continue to become less and less useful.

On one hand you say AmigaOS is not modern enough, but then you expect developers to limit themselves to just OS3.1 features, just because AROS is deficient? If these modern features were added in the future, AROS still wouldn't support them because it is just a (not very good) OS3.1 clone.

And how exactly would you propose supporting memory protection on machines that lack an MMU?

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Well, these kind of EULAs are not enforceable in most jurisdictions anyway so stressing about what it says is probably not worthwhile.

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they cannot contribute because they signed NDAs with Hyperion not allowing them to contribute to anything else

There's nothing like that in the NDA. Why jump to these false conclusions about a document you have not even seen?

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@kolla:

I don't see what that has to do with an NDA. If someone was pasting AmigaOS code into AROS, that would be a copyright violation, regardless of whether they had signed any NDA.

And it's quite normal that NDAs and similar contracts are not public; that's standard practice and I have never seen a company website where such documents were available. For example, A-Eon NDAs have never been published on A-Eon's site. I couldn't find any at Cloanto's either (although maybe they don't need to use them as they don't really do software development, they just sell a free emulator written by someone else).

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@OlafS3:

I don't get this fixation on ancient OS3.1...You want to replace AROS code with OS3.1 code to get an improvement in terms of speed and compatibility but the result would still only be OS3.1 which is 25 years behind. You would need to then fix all the OS3.1 bugs yet again. At least you should want to base AROS on a more recent and better version...!?

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I'm not contributing to 3.1, I'm contributing to 3.2.

It's not about breaking anything but rather the opposite; it's about fixing longstanding bugs and making the system more stable.

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I don't care about 3.1, you are the one saying "3.1 this, 3.1 that". I skipped 3.1 altogether, and moved on from 3.0 to 3.5 in 1999 once I got my prerelease of 3.5, and would probably have left the platform at that time (as far as writing new software for it) otherwise. 3.1 is just too lacking.

If you want something "modern and complete but still compatible" you will be pleased with 3.2. Unfortunately AROS is neither modern nor complete nor compatible, and would not be even with open access to 3.1 sources (since 3.1 itself is none of those things).

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aros is a reimplementation, and not just of 3.1 (as you wrongly insist, just to make it look bad)

Actually it's the official AROS site that is "making it look bad":

http://www.aros.org/documentation/users/faq.php#why-are-you-only-aiming-for-compatibility-with-3-1

The pages on the official site are all just talking about 3.1, same as OlafS3 does. You seem to be the only one making ridiculous claims that it is suddenly better than OS4 and MorphOS. Even 3.1 is only 82% implemented, you can see it there at http://www.aros.org/introduction/status/everything.php

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@SamuraiCrow:

Cloanto are the ones who have brought the litigation, so you should blame them instead.

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All Cloanto has done is keep Amiga alive by selling legal ROMs and paying for improvements to those ROMs and other system files over time.  Hence the 3.X OS designation...as in 3.10 because X=10 because it's an improvement over 3.9.

That's nonsense. I have not seen anywhere where they claim it is supposed to be version three point ten. You can even check their page at https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/15-107 where no such claim is made. Also you can check the version numbers and dates of OS3.X components to see that they are just various random old versions thrown together.

Please tell me how their frankenstein mess of mismatched obsolete OS components is an improvement over 3.9. Anyone can take 3.9, remove half and overwrite half of what remains with with 3.5 versions, causing all kinds of compatibility issues for users and developers. That's more like vandalism than software development. And they certainly haven't improved any part of the OS themselves; what component are you claiming they have upgraded? They don't have source code for any AmigaOS version (including "their" AmigaOS 3.X) nor apparently any Amiga developers on their staff.

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@Louis Dias:

How could that possibly work? Cloanto don't have the source code, nor any legal right to develop new versions of AmigaOS.