Open Source Amiga OS

[wawrzon]

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.

I stopped using my Amiga when I moved out in 2000 and my dad bought me an Athelon64 based PC. I think it was his way of sending me into the cruel dark world
I used Windoze for the next few years(still do at work, but that's a different life) and discovered Linux and it's community back in 2008. I now use it exclusively. I like the ideas behind the community and the development process that goes into the big hitters like Red Hat and Debian.

Since I've resumed my boyish interest in the Amiga community I've noticed the nature of the development is from those that love the platform with little help. I'm not talking about the PPC route here, I like the idea behind OS 3.9 being continuously developed by fans and gifted (and patient) programmers.

This leads me to my discussion point/question.

Would the Amiga community enjoy seeing the OS Open Sourced for the community to continue development? This would be the original 68k code released into the wild, so to speak.

Also, what type of governance would need to be in place to control and manage it's growth in the right directions? (committee, OS Dev Board, etc.)

Finally, do you think that it would attract more programmers (both beginner and advanced levels) to help revitalize and/or expand the platform as with Linux?

you are talking about aros here, as others mentioned, in particular aros68k. it isnt exactly consumer ready yet, but if you wish to try it i can help you to setup it on your machine. note though a plain a1200 would not be eonough. aros needs some 4-6mb ram to fully boot and is better usable with faster cpus.

what concerns open sourcing the genuine os it has been proposed multiple times and against all reason met deaf ears. no chance there. the aros kickstart is the answer to that,

[wawrzon]

That is disappointing, AOS would run on a 68000 and 512K ram, what more does AROS do to justify the faster cpu and 6M ram?

i think the previous answers to that are not exactly spot on. sorry pals.
its true that aros has been developed on comparatively fast x86, but is meant as cross platform and attempts to be also usable on lower end devices such as pi, or the 68k hardware. it isnt optimized enough yet, but the advance towards those lower end systems, in particular genuine amigas forces it into optimizations that could be avoided before. i can observe it very well, running it regularly on amiga hardware. it has become at least two time faster in the last time. its progressing constantly.

also 68k maintainers like winuae autor, toni willen, attempt to allow it run on lowest end hardware possible. aros is compiled without 020 and higher optimizations for now so far i know, so theoretically should run on 68000 cpu with enough ram. on the other hand the question is, why would anyone need or want to substitute operating system on unexpanded a500. no applications need it or could take advantage of additional features on such a limited system, that is actually best used with its genuine 1.3 kickstart. so why bother?

what concerns the system speed and demands, its wirth to mention that on cpu bound tasks, aros is exactly as fast as the genuine aos (i have benchmarked this). the memory allocation is still some 4 times slower i guess, but it is worked on and also tlsf gets implemented. remember also that systems like 3.9 have their demands as well, dont run within 512k ram and need more time to boot. my a4000/060 cold boots from slow internal ide with old slow 1.3 gig drive almost in a half minute, while almost half of that time the drive is spinning up and aros gets softkicked on genuine kickstart after reboot, aros loading up to full desktop/wanderer/workbench would be about 20 seconds then. but booting it to the shell without startup-sequence will take almost an instant.

[wawrzon]

im all for open source in case of amiga, but this is mostly because i relaize there is no place for anything else anymore. open source in most cases cannot replace industry standards. i like inkspace, it is within what i need a usable alternative to illustrator, blender seems ok, especially that it reminds of lightvawe, though the methods are not always that loigical, but gimp is truly not an option!