Interesting how the same thread can come out over and over again.
Six months ago, Rob, the responsible of the Traveller project wrote on its blog a similar proposal, despite based from different concepts: you can find it
here, and
here you can find the subsequent discussion in the forum.
Inside the same thread a proposal from HenryCase in order to avoid a fork and provide both new ways to evolve AROS (such as the holy memory protection grail) and in the same time provide the compatibility with the 3.1 API, but cannot say more about it because he haven't laid out anywhere yet, well maybe this is the right time....
By the way, i guess the post of rob is quite nailing the point: the AROS users and developers bring the same split feelings that Amiga/morphos user bring, therefore what is stopping now AROS to be more developed is the lack of a common goal.
And the fact that some of the assigned bounties were dropped without being brought to completion and not even shared what done so far does not help (tigger and EvilRich around?).
I personally think that AROS should more focus on evolving the amiga os way than simply provide an environment where to play older stuff: it has the potential and should use it.
The problems in a fork are: first that AROS is still incomplete, despite progress is slowly made and, as stated above, the low activity of the community that will slow down even more the activity with the forked project.
But,probably, a fork will not be needed:the latest homebrew hardware events, such as Natami that will lay on Amiga OS but especially on AROS in order to use the superAGA fucntionalities, should provide the way to increase the activity in the integration of old apps with the new system and proceed on porting AROS even on the classic hardware: part of the work has been made with AfAOS, we still need the kickstart and hardware specific code libraries.
At the end what i hope will have, and honestly is what developers need, is a base API reference to write the applications that should be easily portable on all the amiga/morph/AROS platforms and therefore an increase of the available software library and the coming of new developers.
Saimon69
