Profile for nevali

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Email: mo@nevali.net ICQ: AOL: Yahoo:	Username: nevali Realname: Mo McRoberts About me: Homepage: http://nevali.net Face/Logo: Comments posted: 6 (show all)

Recent comments

On Castle reveal shared source licence:

That may very well be true, but right now the only way to accomplish that would be to port it blind: no part of the shared source release can be released as part of—for example—a clone of RISC OS for another platform. In fact, developing such an OS after looking at the sources would leave you wide open to potential legal minefield (much as the ReactOS folks point-blank refused to look at the leaked Windows source code a couple of years ago). A port of RISC OS is, of course, entirely hypothetical, but technical hurdles have always been overcome in the past if there's strong enough will to do it, but with the license as it is it can only ever remain in the hypothetical, and I think that unless things change, it'll one day come back and bite people. nevali on 19/5/07 9:36PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Castle reveal shared source licence:

It's certainly true that RISC OS right now can't compete on the desktop, but the very fact that people run RISC OS on the desktop right now and advocate doing it t means that there are lots of people who want to do just that—and presumably want to continue doing it. I suspect (and of course, I could be wrong), that most RISC OS users on the likes of Drove and TIB could probably care less about RISC OS in embedded systems in much the same way that many Mac users won't really care that the Apple TV runs a modified version of OS X. Most of the stuff talked about in terms of how wonderful RISC OS is [at doing x, or y, or z] has little to do with RISC OS in embedded systems, after all. If you want to make money, then yes, you need to pitch RISC OS at something other than the desktop. If you want to continue using RISC OS the same way that many have for years—that is, on the desktop—then it being limited to ARM will only take you so far. nevali on 19/5/07 9:22PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Castle reveal shared source licence:

Anybody who wants to see the operating system have a significantly longer lifespan than that of the companies responsible for producing the hardware it runs on. This is about the future of RISC OS, after all. Think longer term. nevali on 19/5/07 9:00PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Castle reveal shared source licence:

No, it's not negative per se, it's merely realistic. This license specifically prevents any kind of porting effort, which means that an emulated environment is the only way you could ever see RISC OS on mainstream hardware (technical hurdles notwithstanding). With this license, if the hardware vendors go “kaput” there is absolutely no point in keeping RISC OS going—which would unquestionably be a great loss—whereas a more permissive license wouldn't close that avenue before it's ever become an issue. RISC OS advocacy isn't generally about a piece of hardware that the OS runs on (although the OS being blown into ROM is obviously a factor), it's about the OS itself and the applications that run atop. If you ignore—for the moment—the technical difficulties that would be involved in porting RISC OS to a different architecture, it really boils down to an opinion on the potential future of the RISC OS software platform. Legally, the shared source RISC OS is tied to ARM—not because of technical reasons that could hypothetically (given sufficient time and effort on the part of interested parties) be worked around, but because the people responsible for the OS have a vested interest in hardware sales of a platform that happens to be built around the ARM architecture. ARM doesn't make RISC OS particularly special, it's just what happens to be inside the machines that are built to run it. The use of plural was simply because I (and I suspect a fair few others) would consider the Iyonix and, say, the older A9 machines to be quite different beasts, and not a lot beyond that. nevali on 19/5/07 8:29PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Castle reveal shared source licence:

Not quite; it's to help the RISC OS software platform <strong>provided</strong> it helps the RISC OS hardware platforms. If Castle, et al, go out of business in a couple of years (which is a very real possibility given the state of the RISC OS marketplace), this license pretty much means that RISC OS would die with them. nevali on 19/5/07 7:26PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

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