@Krusher
Basically, an operating system needs a programming language that's accessible for everyone.
I couldn't agree more. Programs like AMOS and Blitz Basic seemed reasonably popular back in the day, hopefully Mattahtias BASIC will be too. I've got a couple of ideas for simple apps I'd like to write using it already.
@bloodline
Yes, the AROS - Kickstart replacement bounty... that's one I'm really looking forward to!
I think I've found a way that the creation of a Kickstart replacement (which is definitely number one in terms of importance out of the unassigned bounties) can be sped up. Have you ever heard of how IBM-PC clones started? Let me explain...
One of the key proprietary parts of the IBM PC back before the clones came was the BIOS. However, Phoenix Technologies (creator of the first IBM PC BIOS clone) worked out an ingenious way of getting around the reverse engineering problem, by using the 'clean room' technique. From Wikipedia:
"With the success of the IBM PC in 1983, Phoenix decided to provide a IBM PC compatible ROM BIOS to the PC market. A licensable ROM BIOS would allow clone PC manufacturers to run the same applications, and even the MS-DOS that was being used by IBM. However, to do this Phoenix needed a strategy for defense against IBM copyright infringement lawsuits. IBM would claim that the Phoenix programmers had copied parts of the IBM BIOS code published by IBM in its Technical Reference manuals. Because, due to the nature of low-level programming, in two well-written pieces of code that perform the same function some correspondence is inevitable, it would be impossible for Phoenix to defend itself on the grounds that no part of its BIOS matched IBM's. Phoenix developed a "clean room" technique that isolated the Engineers who had been contaminated by reading the IBM source listings in the IBM Technical Reference Manuals. The contaminated Engineers wrote specifications for the BIOS APIs and provided the specifications to "clean" Engineers who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. Those "clean" Engineers developed code from scratch to mimic the BIOS APIs. This technique provided Phoenix with a defensibly non-infringing IBM PC-compatible ROM BIOS. Because the programmers who wrote the Phoenix code had never read IBM's, nothing they wrote could have been copied from IBM's code, no matter how closely the two matched. The first Phoenix PC ROM BIOS was introduced in May, 1984, and helped fuel the growth in the PC industry."
Now the Kickstart is low level code and can be reverse engineered. If we can think of a way to recreate the clean room technique and assign two or more 68k coders to assist each other in this way then we're on to a winner (there also needs to be a fair way to split the bounty but lets not worry about that right now).
The only way I can think of to recreate the 'clean room' technique through the Internet is if the person doing the decompiling and analysis stays completely anonymous and unreachable to the 68k code writers. Or maybe there is another way to do it. Any ideas?
Einstein wrote:
Hi HenryCase!
What these bounties should be I don't know. Can someone here tell us which low level sections of AROS need most work?
Resource managers (for resource tracking), including memory manager (for memory tracking and protection).
Result: criminal tasks, instead of the OS, will experience their afterlife. :-)
Hi Einstein! :-)
Yep, they sound suitably important for a bounty. Apart from memory what other resources would need managers? Also, doesn't the x86-64 version of AROS already have partial memory protection? If so, is there any reason why this can't be applied to the other versions of AROS fairly quickly?