2006 is almost gone, more pure death in 2007?

[dammy]

Let me put it to you this way, AROS X86_64's modular kernel will be LGPL'd.  Gotta lot of hopes in 07 for AROS.

Dammy

[dammy]

I fail to see what's so special about AROS running on AMD64.

Will I be able to run more software? Will it be more useful than the current 32bit version?

Until it's back ported to x86, hell yes it's a major upgrade (modular kernel, MMU support) of AROS.  This will allow greater freedom on doing ports of other open source software that would not be possible (ie license conflicts) with the current x86/PPC AROS kernel.  The issue of it being hard real time kernel has been brought up to Michal and he was positive on the idea.  

Does this sound like we are going to see alot of improvement for AROS in 07?  I sure think so.

As far as UAE integration, this maybe the month of a major announcement.  Depends if the dev can finally clear some time for it.

Dammy

[dammy]

How does the kernel license influence the licensing of applications?

It doesn't, I'm referring to value being placed on the new kernel and it's need to be protected.  APL does not give this level of protection to the coder's work, LGPL does.  Michal's new kernel has loadable modules at boot, THAT is what deal with license issues since it's the end user adding whatever modules (and they can be be under GPL or whatever license) at boot.

If the kernel is modular, with clearly defined interfaces, and drivers are distributed separately from it, does the license really matter at all? (Even if individual users 'taint' their kernels, as long as they don't redistribute that combination as a single package they're pretty well out of the grey area. Same thing goes for ugly proprietary Linux drivers, like the nVidia blobs, though the concern there is that RedHat et al would like to be able to legally ship single packaged products that actually work on anyone's hardware.)

It also allows non-driver modules to be added to the kernel at boot.  If you look at TUX, you can see there are possibilities of adding non-drivers modules.  I've been pushing for hard real time module (the actual kernel has a real chance to be real time based) for those who need it.  Perhaps some coder will want 68K emulator in the kernel itself instead as a module.

Dammy