But a developer that is not motivated by money is motivated by the beauty of the design (or, at least mostly, and typically). Unfortunately, this is exactly *not* what we find in case of AmigaOs.
thats scary news, since that is exactly the reason of the current situation, there is apparently no money to be made nor personal satisfaction here and therefore there is no updates. what concerns aros state, progress and motivation of the developers you dont even need to rely on deadwoods reports. you can simply judge that quite objectivly based on the rete and content of commits:
https://trac.aros.org/trac/timelineAgain, to repeat myself, the motivation between closed source and open source are entirely different, and the source of the motivation does not necessarily correlate well to the needs of the project.
the question is who defines "needs of the project". in case of os4 there is a "commercial" entity whose interest is a basic support the variety of hardware their customers could be convinced to collect. this is how they earn their money, as its been openly admitted by their technical director. now, does the vaste majority of potential target audience agree with it? it doesnt look like that. so wouldnt it be better to align to what that target audience postulate? this option has been refused and openly blocked for years, while trying to impose the solutions on the audience, argumenting with loyality, necessity to support the platform and the like. in this context open source, like aros, seems like more flexible option.
Yes, but the drawbacks are that
you cannot steer the development
as we see the current politics have led to nothing. in a democracy the leaders would be voted away in such case. in a serious enterprise management would have to take consequences and would most likely be replaced. even a tyrant in a totalitarian state might face a threat of revolution. this is how society dynamics handles such issues, and it happened in case of what is left of amiga: people realized there is no fun here anymore and left.
is there any possibility for wider audience to reconsider and return? i dont know. but certainly not by the means that are currently proposed. and its not solely os4 i am speaking of.
you cannot enforce compatibility
you can, in fact everybody can, depending only on dedication and skills, the sources are at your hands. this is the question of personal initiative and cooperation. the opposite is the case: in closed source development environment you cant enforce anything except you are the leader of the project. you can only pretty please. and this has been proven not to work in this particular case.
you cannot ensure that your users are happy (unless your users are your developers)
we wouldn be talking about this subject if the majority of users/developers were happy with the situation as is. amiga community today only has sense and chance as a pool of initiatives (which it is, look at the amount of projects going on). treated sipmly as a dumb customership and solely as a source of income, that needs some half done products thrown at it it wont fluorish but decay.
Once again, for AmigaOs, the major problem is really the amount of legacy cruft. As an open source developer, there are many constructions I would like to get rid off. However, as a project manager, I would certainly tell my developers not to touch them because they would break applications.
therefore it isnt wrong to start from the scratch in certain cases. as a user/tester/contributor to aros68k i see the compatibility improving nevertheless.
Can you really tell open source developers: "Hey, keep this interface stable for the next years"? My experience with Linux is: No, you can't.
you dont need to tell that to the developers, they now that themselves. this is the whole point in aros abi v1, where one of the main references is binary compatibility to the esicting amiga software.
certainly there are corner compatibilty cases where the agreement is difficult, some software poking with the internal structures, which are not exactly aligned as customary, like in case of hd-rec. but even in this particular case the source of the application is open and allows adjustments. see the gain?
