And seriously MorphOS-Team has a masterplan?
Well, I don't know if it's a
masterplan (only time will tell, however their idea with building a wide support for mainstream PPC Mac HW was indeed genious), but at least they communicated a plan with a short-term, mid-term and long-term perspective two years ago (
link 1), including a roadmap (
link 2) describing specific features planned for "next release" and for the following releases. This was in 2011, by now you can tick many things off from that check list.
There once was some specific features outlined for OS4.2 as well, given OS4's somewhat odd version system ("OS4.1 update 6"/OS4.1.6) bumping that "1" digit to a "2" will be a major version upgrade which is supposed to be reflected by the features, and true SMP is one of the features that has actually been communicated as being part of OS4.2 on numerous occasions.
And now we hear from the 'development lead': "I have no idea what OS4.2 will contain, when Hyperion say 'it's time for a release' we will release what we think is ready then".
Things changed...
Seriously all OS development right now is "hobby" noone can live of it.
You don't have to tell me that, I'm not the one putting up a false facade of a full working company steaming ahead, building an industry, a commercial future for the platform. I know none of that is true. OS4 had their own situation with unpaid developers (who claim ownership of their code), and some of the people who back in 2004 was sitting on the fence pointing fingers at the "morphos.net" incident, are now active in maintaining the OS4 charade. The little work done is of course purely at a hobby basis (just like AROS and MorphOS), besides Aeon/Acube sponsored driver development.
AMorphOS [...] stucks in PPC the same way as AmigaOS and there is no chance (if you believe the Devs) that this will change in the next years.
Well, the above mentioned plan had a long term perspective that included an ISA change and the development of "NG" features like 64-bit, etc. If you believe the Dev making that presentation, the situation was actually:
"yes indeed, within a few years, we will change the architecture".
Back then when this was discussed, I read somewhere that initial steps had been taken already. That was in 2011, so two of those "a few years" has already passed!
I think it's a fair "guesstimate" that a "X2000" machine won't be here until 2 years from now (Trevor said himself 12-18 months, and he has been shown to be a bit over-optimistic when he made release predictions of his "X1000"). So when (if) the "X2000" is released, 4 years will have passed since that MorphOS plan was presented. Who knows, maybe 4 years is the "few years" needed?
It depends on their ambitions I'd say, a pure ISA migration of what we have today (nothing of the fancy NG stuff) in a clean slate cut from the legacy could probably be done in a few weeks. But implementing SMP, 64-bit, etc would take some development.
(But now we are drifting off topic, let's get back to "OS4" and the "X2000" )
