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Should RISC OS be Open Sourced?

An anonymous reader writes "Aficionados of RISC OS are in a dilemma. With RISC OS Ltd, one of the main developers of the OS, in financial trouble, should RISC OS be open sourced? Users and developers say yes, citing the current slow development of the platform in the hands of its owners. However, Paul Middleton, RISC OS Ltd MD, said, 'It is one thing to release software as open source so that people can look at the source code and help sort out the troublesome problems that "many hands can make light work of". It is completely another to simply say that the source should be freely available to anyone to do with as they like.' Paul also had reservations regarding 'the fragmentation seen in the open source world, such as the number of different Linux distributions and end user support nightmare entailed from that situation.'"

2 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Re:BSD won't die, Neither will Linux. RISCOS might by Nimrangul · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    What does DragonFly BSD have to do with NetBSD? DragonFly is a fork of FreeBSD.

    Are you on crack or something?

    --
    I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
  2. Re:BSD won't die, Neither will Linux. RISCOS might by Billly+Gates · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Appearently you have never ran it.

    Does X even run now without a resort to going on google trying to figure out how to compile it by hand because the ports used the FreeBSD version which was incompatible. By the way this was the 1.0 stable version.