| Ex-Pace staff back RISC OS Open Ltd |
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Published: 9th Jul 2006, 11:48:21GMT Source: drobe.co.uk
By the Drobe news desk
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| Page 1 of 1 |
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| Shareholders include former Pace director and engineers |
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Mysterious new company RISC OS Open Ltd is backed by the former director of Pace Micro's Cambridge engineering division. While the people behind RISC OS Open are keeping schtum, paperwork recently filed by the company and seen by drobe.co.uk reveals those involved.
The team have strong ties with the former Acorn and Pace engineering workforce, and links with the set top box and next generation digital TV industries.
 Andrew Moyler, 45, of Bognor Regis, West Sussex, is a RISC OS Open director and also managing director of Endurance Technology, an electronic design and consultancy business in the digital TV industry. Andrew is also a director of Corton Digital, a management consultancy outfit. He now owns a 20% shareholding in RISC OS Open.
As a divisional director, Richard Nicoll, of Ely, Cambridgeshire, oversaw the 'information appliance division' in Cambridge at Pace - where a number of ex-Acorn engineers found new jobs following the break-up of Acorn. Richard, who is also a project director at Endurance Technology and managing director at Corton Digital alongside Andrew, also owns a 20% stake in RISC OS Open.
Both Richard and Andrew are senior consultants at Pattotek, Peter Wild's electronics company which owns a 30% voting stake in RISC OS 5 developer Castle - which took the OS IPR off Pace's hands in 2003. Corton Digital also lists Pattotek as a customer.
RISC OS Open director and company secretary Steve Revill owns a 20% stake in RISC OS Open, as do each of fellow ex-Pace and ex-Tematic engineers Ben Avison and Andrew Hodgkinson, both living in Cambridge.
And as a telling post to comp.sys.acorn.programmer shows, Steve still has access to the fiercely guarded RISC OS source code.
Steve, 30, of Ely, said of RISC OS Open Ltd: "I'm afraid there isn't any news at the moment. We're working very hard behind the scenes to get this company off the ground and to prepare for an official launch. Until that time, I won't be making any comments about what we're doing."
When asked if there was any connection between Pattotek selling off its Castle stake and the appearance of RISC OS Open, Steve added: "I don't know what the rumours are but I only learned about the proposed sale of shares by Pete Wild on Thursday July 6.
"I can't really think of any way that this will affect what RISC OS Open is planning."
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maikl
9/7/06 12:28PM |
Ok, from the people involved, can somebody guess whether this company will operate in the software or hardware sector? |
dgs (+1.0)
9/7/06 7:01PM |
Incidentally, Richard Nicoll also served on the board of RISCOS Ltd for a while (with his Pace hat on).
Steve Revill is provisionally scheduled to give a talk at the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) on the evening of Monday 18th September. It's currently titled as being a talk about 7th Software and MoreDesk, but it's a long time off so things may or may not get added to the agenda.
dgs |
timephoenix (+1.0)
10/7/06 1:23AM |
If the company does go down the STB / Embedded route, let's hope there's still positive spin-offs for RO desktop users. They say that one of the most important things in business is hiring the best people, and ROOL have certainly made a good start. |
sascott  (+2.0)
10/7/06 9:04AM |
It all looks most interesting. None of this was in the script was it?
I've no doubt in my mind that all this movement behind the scenes is connected with how the platform as a whole has been going these last few years. Rather than get more fed up and moan and groan about it on the Internet, these guys are actually doing something about it?
I await further developments with interest... |
jms
10/7/06 9:43AM |
I assume (without any knowledge whatsoever) that it's a similar move to the open-source Shared C Library but perhaps for the whole of RO - http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact1561.html |
wuerthne (+1.1)
10/7/06 9:56AM |
In reply to jms:
No, that is most certainly nonsense. Nobody will be able to write a RISC OS replacement, neither as open source nor as commercial software. It is simply far, far too big. It would take them 10 years and cost a fortune. |
jms
10/7/06 10:03AM |
In reply to wuerthne:
I reserve the right to be entirely wrong! |
heds (+1.1)
10/7/06 10:45AM |
Well, I'm horribly confused. I must have worked for Pace in an alternate universe where the IPTV division was run by Andrew Clifforth and the engineering manager was Steve Cormie. |
thegman
10/7/06 2:10PM |
In reply to wuerthne:
I'm not sure if it's fair to call that nonsense, much more technically accomplished Operating Systems than RISC OS have been written in less time by fewer people. Look at Haiku, SkyOS, and many others to see the fast progress than can be made with the right team of programmers. I have no idea of what RISC OS Open are up to, and I doubt it's an effort to re-write RISC OS, but the proposition is completely feasible, particularly with the wide range of open-source kernel projects available. |
bucksboy (+1.6)
10/7/06 2:40PM |
The /last/ thing we need IMO is yet another version of RISC OS, open or otherwise. What we do need is, amongst a long list of other things, is a fully-developed browser and up-to-date multimedia capability, and a general sense of direction and coherent planning instead of the various boats being paddled in different directions that we have at the moment.
George |
MikeCarter (+0.2)
10/7/06 3:02PM |
In reply to bucksboy:
Amen |
Pete
10/7/06 3:45PM |
In reply to bucksboy:
"What we do need is, amongst a long list of other things, is a fully-developed browser and up-to-date multimedia capability"
Totally agree, and this is becoming more and more important |
DaveW (-1.0)
10/7/06 4:02PM |
I too totally agree! So what's it all about then? |
hubersn
10/7/06 5:40PM |
Besides OS and application development we also desperately need hardware development. The IYONIX was great in 2002, but all we got up to 2006 is the A9home which is not really a step forward if we talk about horse power.
Maybe emulation is really the way to go in absence of any significant new (fast) ARM CPU. It has the potential to save significant development time because we don't have to fight the hardware (which consumes large amounts of development time - see USB, mass storage, graphics card, printers, scanners, CD/DVD drivers...).
Steffen |
adrianl
10/7/06 6:19PM |
In reply to bucksboy:
Indeed, but do you really need any more proof that it's not viable _commercially_? |
JWCR (+3.2)
10/7/06 6:34PM |
In reply to adrianl:
RISC OS really need someone with a fat enough wallet who believes, as in "Field of Dreams", "If you build it, they will come!" I honestly beleive that if someone made a leap of faith with their investment, RISC OS has such a nice way of doing things that people will flock back to the system. |
steelpillow
10/7/06 7:30PM |
"I only learned about the proposed sale of shares by Pete Wild on Thursday July 6."
"I can't really think of any way that this will affect what RISC OS Open is planning."
Just trying to think up a scenario where this makes sense to me. Select on Advantage6 hardware? |
OliverB (+1.0)
10/7/06 9:50PM |
In reply to JWCR:
I agree about someone taking a leap of faith in the
RISC OS market. Look what happened to Apple in the late 90's when they launched their iMac G3. When they launched it sales of apple macs increased massively, and they soon became well recognised for their computer hardware design. What RISC OS needs is someonwe with alot of money and a good idea that will get RISC OS noticed. |
bucksboy (+1.0)
11/7/06 8:38AM |
In reply to OliverB:
I agree with your point about the iMac. If you have a good product, stick with it. Porsche nearly went bankrupt in the eighties, and there was no shortage of know-alls who said that rear-engined sports cars were a niche product that no-one wanted any more. They were wrong: the 911 is still the backbone of the range and selling better than ever. We have a good product, and the huge advantage, which didn't exist a few years ago, of being able to port opensource software to make good the shortcomings of native stuff. But there needs to be general agreement on the route forward, and an end to duplication of effort in some areas at the expense of no effort at all in other equally important ones.
George |
hEgelia (+4.3)
11/7/06 11:32AM |
Some people might be missing a point here. As it stands, RO and its current range of (native) machines could not really survive out there, because both RO's (internal) architecture and CPU power is lacking to compete with PC and Mac offerings. The fact RO machines are necessarily somewhat more expensive doesn't really help either. I use the term 'compete' because it's still a commercial market. So, frankly, as it stands the platform couldn't survive outside our own humble, thoughtful little market.
Even though the Mac comparison is interesting, it isn't really fair. Whilst at a low point, Apple and its market still was considerably larger than ours + their hardware and software could still compete with PC's. Furthermore, although Apple managed to revive, they still couldn't get much further without radically overhauling their OS, which resulted in the creation of Mac OS X. Something similar would have to happen for us. Even if we were to be succesful at an initial marketing of RO machines, we would absolutely need to have an offering which could seriously compete - the Iyonix simply doesn't compete, certainly not at its price-point which could only change when Ix's are mass-produced.
In reply to bucksboy:
"We have a good product, and the huge advantage, which didn't exist a few years ago, of being able to port opensource software to make good the shortcomings of native stuff."
We have an excellent GUI + a few sidebenefits, wrapped in a relatively poor product. That may sound cynical, but as a commercial product having to withstand a competitive market it's also realistic. We've always been able to port open source code, though nowadays the situation is distinctly better ofcourse. However, how encouraging that may be, an Iyonix or A9home still isn't capable of achieving the same (multimedia) feats as standard on contemporary Macs or PC's. That's the issue; technically our beloved computersystem is outdated. Sure, if you don't need Skype, DVD mastering, realtime audio or video manipulation, 3D graphics rendering, etc... then yes, a RO machine would fit in beautifully. If this market wants to revive, a very large amount of cash combined with a very well thought out strategy is required - a lot would have to change. With every year that passes, RO is getting more and more inferior as the likes of Apple, the Linux world or even Microsoft are duplicating the few key-benefits RO still has going for it. In other words, if we want to stand a chance, something needs to be done sooner rather than later. Let's hope ROOL can play a part in that. |
Jwoody
11/7/06 11:51AM |
"the huge advantage, which didn't exist a few years ago, of being able to port opensource software to make good the shortcomings of native stuff."
Sorry have to disagree with that point. Firefox was the nearest thing to an OpenSource application being ported and it stalled when the hard grind began with fixes. ( I am sure a FireFox 2 with javascript flash etc would make the A9's memory look very suspect. )
If opensource is so easy an option where is the RISC OS versions of OpenOffice, native GIMP, Inkscape, Paint.NET, Scribus, Ekiga, Xara XL |
thegman (+4.2)
11/7/06 12:18PM |
To be honest, I think the technical hurdles for ports is only a small part of the problem. While the A9's and the Iyonix's very slow processors are a problem for ports such as OO, GIMP etc, a greater problem is their UIs, pretty much the only remaining reason to use RISC OS is it's UI, and ports such as FireFox do not really use a pure RISC OS UI. So the question is, why would I pay about £600 for an A9 (which I have) to run applications which run better, are better supported, look nicer, and are more likely to be kept up to date on a computer which costs me half as much?
Being frank, I don't see that much value in the port of FireFox, but the UPP's projects such as UnixLib are immeasurebly valuable as it allows back end code to be ported relatively easily. What RISC OS needs is modern capability, but keeping a RISC OS UI, without the UI, there is no reason to buy a RISC OS computer. I think UnixLib helps a great deal in this respect. |
bucksboy
11/7/06 12:35PM |
In reply to Jwoody:
I only meant 'easy compared with writing the apps from scratch': I accept that porting a large app like Firefox requires both time and effort.; just less than a ground-up development like Netsurf.
George |
Jwoody
11/7/06 1:20PM |
"I accept that porting a large app like Firefox requires both time and effort"
Trouble is it is not a port. A port implies a recompile with a few changes. Peter Naulls choose to try and develop ChoX11 or what ever it was called. This would allow any X11 application to run and was very ambitious. Most opensource software uses a graphics library like Gtk or what ever and these have been developed for Windows and allowed OpenSource to move to Windows. An ambitious project like ChoX11 converting X11 calls to RISC OS GUI calls is a lot more difficult than developing an application from scratch especially to remove all the bugs. Perhaps if Peter had been less ambitious and written a RiscOS graphics library like Gtk then at least some of the Open Source applications would be available by now. Personally I would not hold my breath for Firefox or indeed any other serious Open Source application under RISC OS and as thegman says lots of users don't want them anyway as the GUI by necessity is different. |
bucksboy
11/7/06 1:53PM |
In reply to Jwoody:
thanks for the informative (to me at least) reply. It's a shame about Firefox; it could have been the solution to what I think is /the/ most crucial RO lack, an effective browser. I've tried Netsurf, but without Javascript it can't interact with a lot of the sites I use and I can't see the point of constantly swapping between two or more browsers, so FF remains my browser of choice despite its unfinished state. That's my point really: if there was some entity with an overall grasp of the issues affecting the platform, or even a genuine agreement, getting a browser done would surely be right at the top of the to-do list. But we drift on, with companies who can't agree and haven't got the cash to do it on their own ploughing their own furrows regardless. Or at least that's what it looks like from here. I'm off to the pub.
George |
jonix (+1.2)
11/7/06 2:14PM |
In reply to JWoody:
"Trouble is it is not a port. A port implies a recompile with a few changes. Peter Naulls choose to try and develop ChoX11 or what ever it was called."
It most definitely is a port! The whole point of putting all that effort into ChoX11 was so that a port would simply be that, a recompile with a few (possibly none) changes. You have demonstrated that you don't understand the intention of ChoX11 or the porting process itself. ChoX11 can be used with any X11 based application, not just Firefox. The work is fundamentally important.
In reply to JWoody:
"An ambitious project like ChoX11 converting X11 calls to RISC OS GUI calls is a lot more difficult than developing an application from scratch especially to remove all the bugs."
What information do you have to back that up? It sounds like mis-information to me.
In reply to JWoody:
"Personally I would not hold my breath for Firefox or indeed any other serious Open Source application under RISC OS"
And yet you can download and use it [Firefox] today. You are being ridiculous. Yes, it's not perfect and it does need some work. I don't see anyone picking up the source and giving it a helping hand - perhaps this is the real problem? There is only so much that one person (who now has full time commitments) can do. |
RichardHallas (+6.4)
11/7/06 2:36PM |
The iMac, to a degree, is one of the reasons why Phoebe didn't make it out of the door; or, at least, it's an excuse for the fact. I remember someone at Acorn (Stan Boland, I think) saying that the iMac was a real "conviction launch" and that Acorn couldn't hope to match it.
This was true in terms of marketing clout; Apple was able to afford the kind of huge-scale marketing campaign that Acorn could only ever have dreamed of staging, even at the height of its fortunes, let alone in the late 1990s. But the fact is that the original iMac was actually /not/ a particularly good or innovative machine. It still came with the stable-as-a-stack-of-jelly Mac OS 8, and there wasn't anything functionally spectacular about it. About the only genuinely innovative things about it were that it helped to kill off the floppy drive and that it marked the widespread introduction of USB.
The success of the iMac launch was thanks to (a) the radical styling of the machine (I always thought it looked like a half-deflated beach ball, and not very attractive at all, but most people seemed to like it and it was certainly eye-catching) and (b) the appeal of the marketing. "I think therefore iMac" was a brilliant slogan, and so was the "there's no step 3!" idea: plug it in, turn it on and you're ready to go.
The RISC OS platform would have to catch up with several years' progress, now, for it ever to be in a position to appeal to the mass market. And sadly, especially with Acorn gone, we can't depend on any kind of brand loyalty either. That was something that really worked to Apple's benefit: when the iMac was launched, everyone knew the Apple name, even if they'd never used an Apple computer.
RISC OS users seem to spend a lot of time these days bemoaning the lack of fast new hardware and an Iyonix successor, but I really don't see this as an issue; at least, not with the software catalogue we've got today. The Iyonix in particular is very comfortably fast, and runs all current RISC OS software extremely well. Now, if we had high-end applications for video editing, DVD playback and that sort of demanding task, it would struggle to cope, so in a Brave New World with a greatly expanded catalogue of high-end RISC OS software, I'd agree that new, faster hardware would be a big benefit. But there's no real prospect of any such new software appearing, and with the current range of RISC OS applications that we've got, there's really no pressing need for newer, faster hardware. I'm not saying it wouldn't be good to have it, but there are higher and more affordable priorities, and a good modern Web browser is only one of many important things that we need.
I reckon that there are two absolutely essential prerequisites, if the RISC OS platform is to have any long-term future at all, and they are:
1. New, modern software to fill holes and deliver the current-day standard functionality of other platforms; and
2. Cooperation and coordination between those responsible for the development of this software and the OS itself.
The second of those things is the more important, and is what we need right now. Absolutely the worst possible scenario that a platform that's fighting for its life could face is for all those involved with its future to spend their time fighting amongst themselves, pulling in lots of different directions, bad-mouthing each other, duplicating each others' efforts, wasting time on trivialities when there are important things to do, and generally disenchanting the few users they have left. Unfortunately... need I say more?
For there to be any kind of a future at all, we need an end to this exasperating, pointless, self-destructive political infighting. Not only that; we need the opposing parties to put their differences behind them and work together. The arguments are all long past their sell-by dates, and the only thing the politics can ever possibly achieve is the destruction of whatever slim hopes may exist for the future of the platform.
hEglia: I wrote the above before seeing your post, but the points you make seem absolutely right to me. |
Jwoody
11/7/06 4:41PM |
"Jonix It most definitely is a port! The whole point of putting all that effort into ChoX11 was so that a port would simply be that, a recompile with a few (possibly none) changes."
I think you will find that ChoX11 was pretty basic before Firefox, so it had to be written it would only be a port when ChoX11 was 100% complete.
"ChoX11 can be used with any X11 based application, not just Firefox. The work is fundamentally important" I never said it was not. I just said that people in the windows world took the easier option of porting the graphics libraries for GIMP etc rather than an all singing solution for the whole of X11.
"I don't see anyone picking up the source and giving it a helping hand - perhaps this is the real problem?" Well I suspect that one of the problems at least is that you would have to fix bugs in ChoX11 and thats not any easy thing to do given the complex problem its trying to solve. |
hubersn (+1.0)
11/7/06 5:23PM |
In reply to RichardHallas:
overall, I agree with most of what you said. But remember: the things that you described as "high end applications" are bog-standard stuff on other systems. So the "new, modern software" you demand needs either a lot more developers than RISC OS ever had in the past, or it needs at least the same hardware performance as the competition to be able to take advantage of ported software.
While ChoX11 is IMHO a brilliant idea and well-engineered, it can't be the sole solution for our problems, even if it would be "perfect" and accompanied by RISC OS layers of other graphics toolkits. Imagine a world where we would be able to port all open source software by just starting a compile, and the result would fit perfectly into the RISC OS application world. Would it help gaining new users? Very unlikely, because those apps would run a lot slower than on the competing machines, which are also less expensive.
Without significantly faster hardware, we have lost the battle for the new, modern software before we even start to write the first line of code. Sure, we could do a lot with the current hardware. But this is nowhere near enough to win new users.
Sorry to sound so pessimistic. I have just wasted more hours testing CDVDBurn just to find out that the IYONIX DVD writing speed is much too slow for current drives and media. And to solve this problem, it would only need a bit of software, not a completely new machine - but it hasn't happened in the last four years. This is part of the reason why I nowadays think that going down the "pure emulation route" would be very benefical - at least, we would automatically profit from much of the hard work and parts of the hardware progress done outside the RISC OS community. That's a lot more than the progress we got since the launch of the IYONIX. Both the hardware and the software gap are widening fast.
Steffen |
Jaffa
11/7/06 5:50PM |
The only long-term solution IMHO to the problems besetting the platform is one of:
1) A very rich sugar daddy with deep pockets and a whim for niche computers.
2) A new, almost from scratch, RISC OS targetting *commodity hardware*.
Let's face it, Syllable/SkyOS et al all probably have more buzz and more active programmers than RISC OS at the moment; and these have been written by small teams in the last few years.
Capitalise on what's good (the GUI and the overall simplicity of the system), then start from scratch (possibly using an existing kernel, e.g. Linux). Throw out what's not working: the hardware.
Of course, you'd have to be mad to try and do this as a commercial venture: there's almost certainly no money in it (at least to start with) so you'd have to do it open source[1].
I give you... RISC OS Open 
Just some idle late afternoon day dreaming.
Cheers,
Andrew
[1] Of course, you might still want the aforementioned sugar daddy - look at Mark Shuttleworth's investment in Ubuntu: in less than 2 years it's become the de facto easy-to-use Linux distribution. Deep pockets indeed; but a quality product too. |
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