I’ve got to agree with Thomas here. Without strong governance there is real risk of fragmentation from an open source model. We’ve suffered from that ever since the beginning of the post-Commodore era: MUI vs ReAction, NSD vs whatever the other thing was, P96 vs CGX, PowerUp vs WarpOS, and, of course, the big one, OS3 vs OS4 vs MorphOS vs AROS. Each of those splits has diminished the ability of the community to move the platform forward as a whole because each one has made it harder to achieve a critical mass of sustaining users.
Why is critical mass important? Look at what happened with AWeb. We had an open-source web browser! At the time it was the thing we needed most to make our Amigas usable in the modern world! And it fizzled out after just a few maintenance releases. If OS3 fragments we could see the same thing. As much as we want it to be true, open source isn’t a panacea for every situation. Instead of one slow-moving branch we could have 4 dead branches. Given the choice I’ll take the slow-moving branch, thank you.
Thomas is also right that a developer driven model is rarely one for long-term success. Go into a business class in any university and they’ll teach you that product development has to be driven by user needs. Remember the story from the pre-Commodore days when management essentially locked RJ Michal in a room to make him write the Intuition documentation? That was a user-centric decision. We don’t have that kind of structured, considered decision making anymore, and I honestly think we suffer for it. We all like to tinker and customize our systems and there is enormous overlap between developers and users in the community, but it’s not 1:1. I’m one of those idiots who could never get a handle on coding and as much as I love getting under the hood of my system there’s a limit as to how much I’m willing to do. I’ve tried so many times to like Linux, but it’s just a complete disaster beneath the surface. I don’t want to see the Amiga go the same way.
Ultimately, we all want the platform to be free from the corporate and legal shenanigans that are holding back development. I’m just skeptical that open sourcing the OS is the solution to that problem. Unfortunately, I don’t know what other solutions there are. What a mess!