New improved intuition.library version from the Kickstart 3.1

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My personal experience in Amiga land is getting sourcecode for closed source Amiga native software is VERY difficult. I have tried in the past to get the source for the Amiga LHA. and for some code related to SFS to no avail (for bugfixes - SFS maintainer wouldn't help because he didn't want Morphos users to benefit from any improvements - madness), as well as other things. Luckily it is not always the case, but the attitude of Amiga developers is very odd (and out of date imho), especially in the case where a developer no longer wishes to make any improvements themselves - they rather have the software and its bugs die with them than allow others to continue.

Don't miss this aspect of Amiga computing at all, and work almost exclusively with open source these days.

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It's more complicated, actually. Have you ever tried to get a patch or improvement into open source software? Yes, of course, you can patch yourself, but that typically does not help because in the next release, the patch is gone and you have the work all over again.

In the end, it boils down to the very same answer: Talk to people, don't patch.

It's not complicated. And the simple answer is yes. I have - with ease. I have had patches accepted in many projects from small web based applications to well known large collaborative projects.

People resort to binary patches in Amigaland because the source is not available, the author doesn't care, the software has been discontinued and so on. Had the source been available for your code, you could have received a nice source patch in the mail which would have been considerably easier wouldn't it ? As I have already said, getting the source can be very difficult - it's a lovely idea to talk sure, but not everyone is listening (as I have already mentioned when trying to fix issues with existing software on the Amiga before)

It's your choice to licence your software however you want though of course.

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Then, in the end, it does not matter whether the sources are released or not as long as somebody cares. Currently, they are closed, and I frankly say that nobody cares, at least not for the 68K branch. Sad enough. There are enough things that could be done if there would be a way to do that without actually causing irritiation by anyone.    And how does that change with Open Source? It is just the same, as soon as the development team just considers the old software obsolete, you may have the source, cool, but you cannot really do anything about it because it's just a big pile of code you do not know how to work with. Projects got abandoned, and nobody picked them up. Open Source code is very volatile - whether your source still compiles with the latest version of libIdoNotcare.so you never know.

opening the source does not guarantee anything, but there are still skilled programmers out there that could pick up the source and contribute improvements, and there are examples of open sourcing stuff being a success on the Amiga. Had the OS3.x sources been released years ago, I am sure I would have got involved (and I know others that would have also)

I work for a living with open source (as well as in my spare time), and it works very well for me. I have also picked up projects that have been abandoned and have continued to develop them (along with setting up a bugtracker and development site etc). It does happen, and is made possible because the source was available.

Your comment regarding some library dependency is not specific to open source. If an old project doesn't compile, you have the opportunity to fix it, which is certainly a lot more useful than trying to get a 15 year old binary running.

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The arrogant elitism in this thread is really irritating. As though a few think they are the only ones who can develop professionally and know better than everyone else. It links in directly with the out of date attitudes to source too imho. As a retro computing scene, the Amiga scene really stinks sometimes.

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None of the knowledge presented here is new, nor my own invention or finding, or in any way over everyone's head. It is really simple, basic stuff, depending on really simple basic math. Actually, one of the first examples that are usually taught is that a super-fast super-optimized bubble-sort will still be slower than a quick-sort in BASIC (or perl, or python) if there is enough data to look at. The "kool koderz" will complain about the slowness of a high-level language, the software engineer will instead understand that the high level code is not even faster, but also easier to maintain, update and bugfix than the super-optimized algorithm. It's a different perspective you take once you have to work "for living" and not just for fun. If there's still time to optimize that, good for you.

why are you telling me this ? My point was directly related to the way you are insinuating that you have some sort of exclusivity over being a "software developer", or "engineer" whilst the rest of us are just coders and the way you are delivering your arguments. Also these terms are a little meaningless anyway. There are very poor developers who refer to themselves as "software engineers". I rather like the term coder, and I don't go with your definitions.

If that makes you feel any better: Yes, I started with assembler on the Amiga. However, sooner or later, as your projects grow in size, you'll see that you'll hit a "brick wall" where you create code that requires an amount of maintence to update or improve that you cannot manage anymore. Especially in the "improve" part you'll learn that this often goes beyond micro-optimizations - you'll often find yourself in the position to turn around entire code parts because your architecture did not work as intended.

I didn't question what language you started with - are you sure you are replying to the right person ? Thanks for the lesson, but I am already aware of maintaining code in large software projects - as are others on this forum.

Once again: Intuition is a very high-level library, with very few elementary calls made a relatively rarely. It really does not matter much how fast or slow that part is. In a sense, you're looking at the wrong end of the picture and should understand instead the high-level  instead of the low level code. I know that's all you see, but I can't help it. Yes, there are probably a couple of things that are wrong in intuition, but nothing seriously so. It's especially not the "register ping-pong" that's wrong. It's a minor annoyance that hurts nobody and that could be avoided by simply recompiling the code, but without giving a measurable benefit. Pronounciation on "measurable". Why do you care about this then in first place?

I said nothing about this. We of course don't have the source to intuition though (so there is little point in saying it should be maintained from that)

Yes, I'm really serious about "coders" and "engineers". There is a difference, and you should at least try to understand why I'm stressing this difference so much, and what the difference is about. Nothing wrong to start as a "coder", but you should try to conquer new worlds and understand more perspectives as soon as you grow older.

"Nothing wrong to start as a "coder", but you should try to conquer new worlds and understand more perspectives as soon as you grow older. " - oh do stop it with this cr*p. we are not 14 year olds.