Open Source Amiga OS

[NovaCoder]

Hiya,

The only kind of 'open source' you get with the classic side is when people reverse engineer something (which obviously takes ages).  

I guess in an ideal world, the owners (whoever the hell they are) of the original OS could have released the source code to the community after they'd finished developing it (around the year 2000).

The other problem is that a lot of the original OS was written in 68k assembler which doesn't lend itself to being developed further (due to a lack of skilled asm coders).  
It sounds like Hyperion have spent the past decade converting all of that cryptic assembler code to straight C code.   I guess that makes them the only entity that's really in a position to open source Amiga OS.

Then of course you have AROS which has taken a different approach (built from the ground up).

[NovaCoder]

It's  interesting to see what has happened with the Atari Jaguar's development since Atari went bellyup (everything was given over to the community to do with as they wanted).   Ok it's a console and it's user base was tiny compared to AmigaOS but it's still gives you an idea of what might have happen to AmigaOS if AmigaInk had been 'nice' and done the same thing after 3.9 was released.   For one thing I guess we wouldn't have AROS/MorphOS today, or at least AROS/MorphOS would be derived from OS 3.x source code.

If AmigaInc had managed the project in a sensible way (stop laughing), they could have used the open source branch of OS3.x to feed back into OS4.x development.

[NovaCoder]

She was talking about having problems with writing a professional sounding email, and I said I didn't have any issues with that, it's math that I sucked at, which is why I hadn't ever gotten heavily into programming.  She replied, and I quote because I can't make this up...  "Programming is easy, you just copy and paste."

slaapliedje

I send most of my time copy & pasting when I'm coding, the skill is knowing what to copy & paste