This is an extremely valuable question and not enough people ponder it.
The Amiga OS outside of the Amiga Hardware still has a lot of unique things for which it would be cool to have it be able to run on more modern hardware.
History
I have since before the Amiga and up until now used and continue to use many different computing platforms and operating systems, both professionally and out of my own curiosity.
In the late '90s just as Gateway purchased the rights to the Amiga I wrote them an extensive analysis on why they should give up on the hardware game and focus only on the OS. I was shot down by Gateway/Amiga Inc. as they believed that the OS had now future outside the custom hardware. I bet Carl Sassenrath would also disagree with them.
The Little OS that Could
Without a doubt the Amiga OS, true to its goal, is the most user centric and the most user friendly OS ever developed.
This has nothing to do with where the widgets are placed in relation to the window, the small footprint, or the inclusion of pre-emptive multitasking. It is about the paradigms.
The OS paradigms that are at the core of the Amiga OS are in certain ways more relevant today than they were in the late '80s and early '90s. And that makes it doubly tragic that all of the post OS3.x forks are missing this important point.
At the end of the day there aren't many unique OS paradigms in existence today. There is the Unix paradigm, the Mac OS (pre-OS X) and Windows paradigm, there is an assortment of experimental OS paradigms that will most likely never get their "moment in the Sun", and then there is the Amiga OS paradigm.
And yes, there are some superficial similarities between all of these which are there for a bunch of different reasons and have a lot to do with convention.
A really good OS strikes a balance between the user and the developer. As an OS is primarily an environment in which applications are run, it would behove itself to make it easy for application developers to create applications for it. Make it easy for developers to write the kinds of software users would like to use.
Windows is terrible at this. Mac OS X is slightly better only because of the energy that Apple puts in to establish the benchmark and by controlling the tools. Don't even get me started on Unix and Linux.
Amiga OS is the only OS I have had the pleasure of knowing that did this well, without the overbearing control, and in the late '80s and early '90s for crying out loud.
And yes, features such as memory protection, and multiuser environments and better ACLs could be implemented if there was funding.
Amiga OS could be like many of the other OSs, but other OSs have tried to be more Amiga like and failed. There is something in that, do you think?
