Of course, fully open-sourcing the AmigaOS is unlikely (but not impossible) for many reasons and Amiga have in fact struck a deal with major Amiga development house Haage & Partner to take AmigaOS through the rest of its remaining useful lifespan and help bridge the gaps between old and new. There's a great deal of life left in the old OS, particularly if migrated to more modern hardware like the forthcoming G3 accelerators or IBM's eagerly awaited (read: long overdue) PowerPC Open Platform (POP) architecture. Of course, AROS fulfils this need too, with the advantage of being built from the ground-up to support a multi-platform world...
So does one make the other redundant? Not at all, in fact they could well provide a two-pronged attack that could put the original AmigaOS on to many more platforms: a potential AmigaOS mini-renaissance waiting in the wings. Linux and the free BSDs haven't killed off the commercial UNIX world, in fact if anything they've introduced a renewal in UNIX which is eating into the realm of Windows instead. AROS and AmigaOS 3.5+ provide a complementary realm, and healthy competition for each other - a good thing, believe me. The OAF ideal of an AROS Lite will just take things further, providing an important way to sneak the Amiga API and ideals into a broader world while providing tangible benefits for many markets.
In the meantime, the OAF are also concentrating their efforts on supporting community-based efforts to support a thriving toolset of open source software. One particular project the OAF are looking at is to do with some Amiga networking software that should be familiar to many people reading this. The software is called Envoy, and some might recall the last major update was undertaken by Intangible Assets Manufacturing, though this was some time ago. Envoy has many fans out there, and yet the software is effectively gathering dust - potential gone to waste considering the fact that many people out there are running networked Amigas, far more than a few years ago. With the new Amiga plans, as well as the work of projects such as AROS, MorphOS or even UAE, we could see many, many more.
So, here we are with a good networking package doing nothing. Amiga, the current owners of the code,
