I don't see why Apollo needs to be made open source if it is to make use of AROS. Some discussion about supporting AROS (68K) development has taken place (I also believe some actions have already been taken). If the Apollo team do decide to switch to AROS ROMs and AROS distributions I would expect to pay a small premium on the hardware with funds going into AROS bounties. The Apollo team don't selfishly want something for nothing from an operating system, they would have been happy for Hyperion or Cloanto to make a commercial AmigaOS upgrade for 68k/Apollo Amigas but there appears to be no interest from the IP owners.
If like me you think PPC has turned out to be a wrong move by the various parties that have gone down that route then this is a very exciting time. What began with Minimig is finally paying off as FPGA technology has allowed the development of real hardware that enhances the capabilities of the Amiga greatly whilst maintaining good compatibility and all at a very affordable cost.
The Apollo core has been in development for a long time and is still improving but there hasn't been direct parallel development of an Amiga 68K OS. AmigaOS 3.x has continued to be patched up and benefited from some AROS work to give a rag bag of configurations. The back port of AROS to 68K was a big step forward but more work needs to be done and in my opinion it's the correct place to focus on. As soon as a suitable AROS build is available and the 68K parts of the Apollo ISA are considered complete (well tested/no known bugs), AROS is the way to go.
