The debate over whether or not RISC OS should be open sourced took another turn this week when Peter Naulls argued that “certain parts” of the OS could be released under an open source licence. The State-side coder behind various ports including Firefox said this would ideally include “crucial parts that affect all users, even if they don’t realise it, parts that can be created from scratch and made much better than the Acorn original, and parts which can managed by specific developers who already understand them well.”
Does everything in the world need to be open sourced?
No, but infrastructure is important enough that it should be Free Software. That out of the way, I don’t think RISC OS will ever be Open Sourced, they appear to me in a position where the OS is the only thing of value they have.
Also the fact you still wouldnt be able to use it if it was OSS any how, as you’d need an ARM based system, and RiscOS will only run off of ROM chips it wont install to a HD (well atleast last time i checked it wouldn’t), thats one of the secrets behind RiscOS’s speed, the fact it runs from ROM rather than HD
risc os select releases load off the hdd on top of the rom one iirc..
if it was ever opensourced it would be very interesting.. maybe real premptive multitasking could get in some how.
RiscOS does support Soft-updates, allowing you to update the OS by updates installed to a HD, but to update the Entire OS you need an entirely new ROM chip, as the Chips RiscOS uses are Write-Once chips, as Flash-ROMs are seen as too expensive to use.
as you’d need an ARM based system, and RiscOS will only run off of ROM chips it wont install to a HD (well atleast last time i checked it wouldn’t)
In that case– is it possible to make it run on a pda? My Palm and my Zaurus are both ARM powered.
Erm, I’m stupid. They’re both Xscale– is Xscale ARM? I really know fcuk all about this.
The XScale is an ARM implementation. It’s been used in conjunction with a machine intended to run RISC OS[1], but whether something will work in any given computer is of course usually a bit more involved than just whether it has a compatible CPU.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyonix
“No, but infrastructure is important enough that it should be Free Software.”
Well considering at this point Operating Systems are a commodity. Making it open source really wouldn’t contribute much.
wtf? why is this mod 3+
Because it makes a valid point.
No, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
I consider it a good thing that people weigh the advantages and disadvantages of making their projects open source software; however, I have also seen such arguments get to the point where a project gets forked or looses half it’s developers. When the developers decided to work on RISC OS it was not OSS as far as I know, therefore they can ask for a change in license but shouldn’t expect it.
Talks of making making something available under an open source license isn’t a bad thing, if a big enough majority agree to make it OSS then there’s no damage. Damage occurs when radicals either for or against making it OSS try to harm the project itself because of the chosen license.
No, but opensourcing your product instead of letting it die and go to the silicon heaven, when your company goes bankcrupt, is a nice gesture. If you can’t make money out of it, chances are no-one else can, but your existing customers/users won’t be left in a void. They will at least have an _option_ to help themselves. Your company going bankcrupt (i.e. unable to keep its support agreements, among other things) would leave them in complete void.
“No, but opensourcing your product instead of letting it die and go to the silicon heaven, when your company goes bankcrupt, is a nice gesture”
Agree with you. Why letting your flagship product die with your company?
Doing that would leave no one but the enthusiast to reverse engineer the system like what happened with BeOS (Wich BTW I discovered before FOSS and it was to late for me to get) I just hope that doesn’t happen to RISC OS
“No, but opensourcing your product instead of letting it die and go to the silicon heaven, when your company goes bankcrupt, is a nice gesture.”
Well the thing is, unlike a person. When a company dies, it’s assets can live on, by being bought by others (blender), or a company (activision).
“If you can’t make money out of it, chances are no-one else can, but your existing customers/users won’t be left in a void.”
Not necessarily. The retro-game market proves that there can be life all over again for software.
That indeed, they could open source many parts of their system. Either that, or rebuild the OS with componets that were already open sourced. (Similar to MacOSX and Darwin, Solaris and OpenSolaris, etc) Besides, considering that RISC OS is a niche OS having some open source sibling could/would/may/will attract much needed Comunity/User base growth by creating an open source project around the main system.
Oops, forgot to login, but that was me back there
Is an ARM, yes.
is an ARM.. a pathetic one
there was a project at one point to port risc os to the psion netbook.. it fell through for some reason.. Would have been a nice portable risc os machine..
oh well, epoc32 is really nice on mine
Yes Xscale is a rather poor ARM Implementation, Intel decided they didn’t need some of the ARM instructions, namely some of the ones RiscOS uses lol, but Castle Systems has gotten RiscOS to work on Xscale CPU’s as evident by its Iyonnix systems.
“Intel decided they didn’t need some of the ARM instructions”.
Suuuure they did. Of course, no such thing happened, and the company in question is “Castle Technologies”.
Let’s try for some facts instead of making things up:
The XScale, like _all_ ARM implementations since the StrongARM, lacks the old 26-bit mode in favour of using the room for more useful functionality. The conversion of RISC OS to 32-bit was largely done by Pace, not Castle, although it’s true that Castle (and Tematic) did the specific chip-specific support for the XScale and their Iyonix hardware.
More info:
http://www.riscos.info/32bit/
And here’s the original article:
http://riscos.blog.com/356092/
Its RISC OS, not RiscOS. RiscOS runs on MIPS systems and is -entirely- different.
Its the RiscPC, mind, stupid naming that makes the confusion worse.
Could you provide a link to the MIPS “RiscOS” as I can not find any information Pertaining to its existance, Google, MSN, Alltheweb, etc are all just producing Acorn Risc OS links when I search RiscOS
You managed to call RISC OS RiscOS in that very post
MIPS Inc RiscOS was also called RISC/os, that probably will get more hits. The Acorn product was -never- spelt RiscOS.
I said i searched “RiscOS” and all results returned pointed to Acorn Risc OS, look a space between them both, and then I asked for you to provide a link to the OS, as no results had been returned pertaining to its existance, so can you please show where in that post which you are referencing too, that I called Acorn’s OS “RiscOS” opposed to Risc *look a space* OS.
To put It another way… I haven’t heard of “Risc/OS” / “RISCOS” so I need to you to educate me about it, searching Risc/os also returns Acorn RISC OS results, searching “Mips RISC/OS” so far has taught me that it was available in the 1980, and 1990’s other than that I have no knowledge of the OS.
I called Acorn RISC OS, RiscOS due to my ignorance that another OS called RISCOS or Risc/OS existed, as far as I was concerned RiscOS, was just an Alias many use for Risc OS, just like People call GNU/Linux, Linux. IBM AT-PC Compatibles, PC’s and Apple Machintosh’s, Mac’s.
I’ve acknowledged the existance of this other OS, with the name RISCOS, but as I said I’m ignorant of the details about it.
Spelled was never spelled spelt either
Uhm… In British English (aka International English) there is the word “Spelt”
http://img349.imageshack.us/img349/3698/spelt7ku.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RiscOS
http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/RISC/os
Now, every single thing on the web that refers to RISC OS as “RiscOS”, “Risc OS”, etc, is COMPLETELY WRONG. Its like the “BEOS” references (When its BeOS). And you went and repeated that which was wrong as it if it was right.
Thank you thats all I wanted, a link explaining what Risc/os was / is.
Just to nit pick a little, it is more commonly referred to as MIPS OS
Is that Blue Eyed OS (BEOS) you are talking about?
Is that thing still running?
Ummm…I do remeber Blue Eyed OS, I wonder how they went. The best I attempt I have seen so far is OpenBeOS/HaikuOS
are we gonna discuss semantics or the article?
btw, mod me down if u want
btw, mod me down if u want
I did, just for you saying that. That line is seriously over-used.
Hell no!
Hell yes!
Wait… uhm…. I guess that was about as informative as your post
Whether or not to open source it (after MYOB’s post I’ll just call it “it”
is difficult to say for me. I can’t see what they would gain, and I can’t see what they would lose.
But personally I’m like 60/40 in favour of open sourcing (or how it’s spelled).
Xscale is not an ARM. It simply executes ARM code, and passes the test suite. The reason that flash isn’t used in RiscPCs isn’t because it’s too expensive, it’s just plain incompatible and unreliable. Iyonixes and A9Homes are Flash-based, IIRC. You can replace the ROMs in software with a softload that “overlays” the ROM for short-term upgrades. RISC OS’s speed has nothing to do with it running from ROM rather than a hard disc. Pre-emptive multitasking would require pretty much every piece of software to be rewritten – there are many things where there is only one context. RISC OS needs a lot of work to be ported to a new device, nomatter which ARM-like CPU it has. RISC OS is old, unstable, and has little development done on it.
There, that should set straight some of the utter bull been said here.
…there’s always ROX.
Who would care?…
Sounds too riscy to me!
hardware is now open sourced,computer reservations systems such as Amadeus,Galileo,sabre and worldspan should follow, they proberly won’t as the end-user has no real use for it.
There are some compilers by Portland Group and intel that are not open source, they should.
Endorphin (http://www.naturalmotion.com) should be open source
Risc OS should be opensourced.
You have some software that runs well in minimum memory, you have a development community around it, you have potential uses for it – and no one is going to do a thing about it.
The people who could do things with it, such as porting it to new chips, can’t; and those who could, won’t – because they don’t have the incentive in the form of established customers, and they never will, because nobody except the Risc OS hobbyists can see the potential.
That do as a workable analysis?
I totally agree. Porting to a new chipset/device like pepper-pad would be possible with open source. Do you agree?
No, not at all. It would take far too much effort and be of little benefit. But I already wrote an article on this:
http://riscos.blog.com/302013/