|
Georg Steger submitted
a short essay on whether AmigaOS should be Open Source, and how to a
certain extent (for some people) it already is, or was.
A few days ago I have heard from a reliable source that
there are quite a lot of people who are in possess of
the AmigaOS 3.1 (and older) sources. And this since
very long time (> 5 years).
And this people are not Amiga Inc. or Haage&Partner
people. Most of them are very well known and famous
among Amiga freaks. For example former employees of
Commodore, authors of Amiga programming books, some
"butterflies".
It seems that the AmigaOS sources have helped this
people in making their products/software/hardware/whatever
for Amiga. It's very likely that without the AmigaOS sources some
of the products would not even have been possible to make.
So it was probably no bad thing for Commodore/Escom/Gateway/
Amiga Inc. More likely the opposite: maybe Amiga would have
been (really) dead since long time, if this accidents (AmigaOS
source going out of their hands) had not happened.
Amiga Inc. says they are commited to open source. But anyway
they don't seem to have any intention to really release
AmigaOS Classic as Open Source, for everybody. They must
have very weird reasons for this. "Protect their IP"? Then
why are the people mentioned above no problem for them?
(and I cannot believe that Amiga Inc. does not know anything about
other people having access to AmigaOS sources). I guess it's clear
why: these people were and are good for them.
But then why not release AmigaOS source for everybody?
The argument that it would hurt Haage&Partner, Cloanto, ...
is not true, IMHO. After all Amiga Inc. is working on a
new OS, and AmigaOS 3.9 seems to be the last update to
the classic OS. Even if the AmigaOS sources would have
been released a year ago, there is very little chance that this
would have caused any competition to AmigaOS 3.9 once
it is released.
So if certain non-Amiga Inc. people are allowed to have the
AmigaOS sources, maybe even make money based on what they
learn from the sources. Why aren't other people allowed to
do the same, like the AROS team? Who do everything for
free, where the source already is free and which everyone
can use for whatever he wants.
Without AmigaOS sources as documentation it of course takes very long
to finish AROS. But one day it will be finished - if Amiga
Inc. is so kind not to kill us shortly before ;-) BTW:
I'm wondering which source will then be worth more: AmigaOS
source (mix of ASM/C/BCPL and very hardware dependant) or
AROS (almost C only, almost hardware independant, RTG, RTA,
portable). I don't know ...
| 