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Open Source AmigaOS?

© John Chandler

The seeds of turning AmigaOS into an open source operating system were scattered shortly after the demise of Commodore. In the fear and uncertainty about the future of the Amiga, some visionary people got together and asked themselves one simple question: "What's the most important, salvageable part of the Amiga?" The answer was the operating system, and thus AROS (Amiga Replacement Operating System, now Amiga Research Operating System) was born - an open source, community-developed OS source compatible with OS3.1 (but also binary compatible on existing Amigas).

The debate about making the official AmigaOS open source has struck home again in recent months and I'm steadily being swayed towards the whole idea as time goes on - particularly as Amiga Inc. trim off little slices of OS3.5 (the final 'Classic' AmigaOS release) like official retargetable graphics and audio support, probably to ensure a reasonably swift release.

AmigaOS 5+ is the future of the Amiga, and Amiga Inc. has every right to work on this development line on their own and for financial gain - that is only fair. However, versions of AmigaOS prior to the "next generation," the so-called "Classic" AmigaOS releases, are old and soon to be obsolete - apart from licencing to the developers of Amiga Emulators like Amiga Forever, how can Amiga Inc. possibly make any cash or kudos out of these releases? It's great that Amiga Inc. have diverted resources towards OS 3.5, but doesn't that affect OS 5.0? (The November Box is already about 4 months late.) Surely there must be a better way...

Tribute goes to Squid's Amiga Page and Rumour Mill, a fine and well-recommended piece of Amiga writing, for recently highlighting the fact that open source doesn't necessarily equate to free and publicly available. Amiga Inc. could easily make money by licencing the source code out to developers - with, perhaps, different licence fees for different applications. The educational market (and I'm casting a nod here to MINIX, the OS that inspired a certain computer science student to write something called Linux) could be supplied with a cheap version of AmigaOS for classroom study (preferably bundled with a solid text book). AROS could take out a licence for OS 3.1 and save a lot of hard work having to write the entire OS from scratch. Commercial developers could order a more expensive licence and distribute ports of AmigaOS for PowerPC, Alpha, StrongARM, x86, MiPS or whatever else you would want to run AmigaOS on. I'd like to point out at that I personally would do anything to run AmigaOS 3.1 on a dual-PowerPC PIOS/Met@Box