This version has been dubbed AROS Lite, and will ultimately be shipped under the GPL licence. In fact, the OAF have even been in contact with GNU/Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman for advice - and it certainly looks like the FSF have taken a serious interest in the project which could give it important recognition. AROS Lite will continue to retain the slimness and efficiency of AmigaOS, making it an ideal OS to download quickly and cheaply, even over a moderate modem link. In the days of free OS downloads from the likes of Be or Linux which are several dozen megabytes, there's still a hefty cost involved - particularly for those of us still limited to metered calls over slow phone links.
AROS began as a project to continue the most important and salvageable component of the Amiga, at a time when both new hardware and OS developments were looking unlikely. The Campaign to Open Source the AmigaOS arrived with similar aims, but rather than work on writing the OS from scratch, the decision was to campaign the owners of AmigaOS to open source the code, which as a side-effect would also provide AROS with the valuable information needed to quickly complete itself. At the time, the original OS was looking a bit of a bleak and discarded component - even the planned OS upgrade, AmigaOS 3.5, had been cancelled and the idea had distinct merits. I had even briefly pondered on the
