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Opening Amiga Source Proposed
Count Fragula writes "Just wanted to pass this along to the OSS community. It looks like Eric S Raymond, among others, has assisted in working up a proposal to Open Source the AmigaOS. In light of the fact that the Amiga, as a platform, is (at least commercially) under some kind of curse, this may be a Good Thing. Heck, there's a lot of really good substructure there waiting to be brought up to to the present decade."
Remember, Commodore never had the thousands of engineers munging the code that Netscape had, and the OS was modular in the first place (with the exception of the graphics system, which would need to be totally re-written a'la' Mozilla), which made it much easier to keep things clean.
Of course, it got crufted a bit at the end, as Commodore died, but so it goes. There wasn't enough engineers left at Commodore by that time to do TOO much damage to it...
Actually, the hardest problem with AmigaOS nowdays would be compiling it. It was written in pre-ANSI-C days, and I suspect that modern compilers would choke on it :-(.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Open sourcing the OS would be nice, but I don't think much would come out of it other than someone might go out and add memory protection or (ooh!) integrate ShapeShifter into the OS? It'd be like gutting a vintage stereo with modern equipment because the asthetics please you. I would vote for someone to made draggable windows and virtual memory for starters.
I recently dug my old A2500/30 out of the dark to revive a bit. Granted I am just working on backing up my 1.2GB of hard disk storage for use on an emulator, but I get such a kick out of using it again.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I'll take it! But I won't share it with Rich... It can join Kramer, Bushwood, and my iBook in the Geek Room instead where I'll give it the respect it so richly deserves.
Rich is a pretty good programmer for a business dweeb - he does 4GL stuff well and he was a whiz on the Newton when it came out (he wrote a Sybase front end for it - it was cool). But I think that an Amiga might be beyond him a tad.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Clause critique:
1) The software is still copyrighted
All software ever written in all history that has not been explicitly placed by its copyright holder into the public domain is copyrighted, including everything under the GPL. In fact, software that is not copyrighted cannot be effectively GPLed, since agreeing to a license is unnecessary to use the code.
2) any of that "really good substructure" that finds its way into Linux is a big legal problem waiting to happen.
If and only if the open-source license adopted is not the GPL and is not GPL compatible.
Seriously, if you want a fully buzzword enabled OS with some raw power behind it (not to mention something that is up to date, clean, an quite free of cruft) I don't think you can do much better than BeOS.
Try it! It really is Bliss expressed in 1's and 0's!
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I'm sorry, but I think you (and a bunch of other people here) have missed the point. One of the advantages of Open Sourcing the Amiga OS would undoubtably be to decouple it from the hardware dongle, which even the owner doesn't want to sell anymore. Trust me: almost nobody cares about the hardware anymore. Those who do, are viewed as fanatics even among the ranks of us Amiga fanatics. :-)
Amiga hardware was very cool up until through the early 90s, but as mass-market commodity chipsets caught up, a lot of Amiga users tried to adopt them. My Amiga has a graphics card and a sound card based on PeeCee chipsets. I don't use the Amiga chipsets for those things anymore. Hell, I don't even use the built-in serial port anymore. She's a Frankenstein machine (and it's only going to get worse once I put a G4 PPC in it).
But the hardware isn't the only Frankenstein part -- it's the software too. The OS is tied to obsolete things like the Amiga chipset and even the 68k processor itself, and over the years, all sorts of competing hacks have been used to extend it and make it more device independent. They sorta work, but there's a lot of reinvention and infighting. (The Phase 5 vs H&P approaches to PPCs, for example, and the earlier CyberGraphX vs P96 wars.)
Open Sourcing AmigaOS would permanently fix this problem. Imagine being able to run AmigaOS on a fully modern computer, instead of an AmigaDongle that has a bunch of cyber implants to modernize it! Oh, and some people say, 'What can the Amiga do that OS ___ can't?' Well, turn the question around: What can OS ____ do that AmigaOS can't? There are in fact a few things, but not many. If anyone advocates against Open Source AmigaOS, I have to wonder: What are you afraid of?
Would I use an Open Source Amiga OS? No, probably not. If it had been done a few years ago, maybe. But a few months ago I finally decided to commit to Neutrino. Yet there are still a few people who don't want to go to Neutrino (for whatever reason) and I think an Open Source AmigaOS would be a great way to give them a fighting chance. Why would anyone be against that?
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You answered your own question. They want to revive it so that they can update it to use modern hardware.
Because it is a lot of work to write a new OS from scratch. The AROS people seem to be trying to do this, but it isn't ready yet.
And existing open source OSes (e.g. Linux) are already so tainted with Unix-thinking that it would be virtually impossible for it to ever elegantly incorporate the things that made the Amiga good. Either the Amiga values or the Unix values (or both!) would end up getting mocked and kludged.
It doesn't. In fact, an independantly made open source Amiga clone can't be called that, or there would be trademark problems.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The Amiga, as I recall, was a hardware *and* software combo.
To GPL the Amiga, you would have to GPL the whole she-bang.
A lot of talk about making the PLEB project's boards GPL has been going around (we got feedback from RMS about it).
The bottom line is that the GPL is not made for hardware. Period.
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Disclaimer that probably won't be believed
This is a question. I'd like to know the answer. Flame if you must, but this isn't flamebait.
The amiga was cool in its day. That day is now long past. Any proposed new machine will bear little relation to the original, so why bother?
I'm all for new computers if they do something no exising one does, but the Amiga (in any of its guises) seem to do nothing a PC running Linux or BeOS can't do.
cleaver hack
LOL...was this intentional, or a typo?
What is the real utility of that kill process code?
Umm...what is the real utility of Doom? What is the real utility of a GUI for that matter? you can do the same thing with a CLI.
It's an interesting thing about pure research. It can produce a long chain of useless (but neato-cool) stuff. Then somebody comes along and says "I can take these six useless research projects and create something AMAZING out of them!" What many people forget is that the amazing thing is merely the final link in a long chain of useless things.
So what good is the "cleaver hack"? Don't know, but I saw a lot of creative thinking in the discussion that resulted from it...some of it might be useful some day.
If anyone wants to try making Linux (or whateer - I've jsut picked that as the only completely open-source option listed) as easy to use and configure and as fast as my old A1200 then they've got my support. But I don't see it.
:( I loved my Amiga (still do!), I loved the ease with which I could tinker with it and the near-impossibility of breaking it. I loved its compact efficiency. I loved the user community, so friendly and with such a strong freely distributable market. I loved the way that almost anyone could pick it up - I mean, my mum was fine on the old Amiga! When we moved to Windows 95 and Word, though, she got confused, she got agitated. She also got a Brother Word Processor.
I've no idea what the technical state of relative operating systems is today so I can't say whether the Amiga's got a wonderful deterministic scheduler with sensible multithreading (to pull terms out of the air) that hasn't been equalled elsewhere. It wouldn't surprise me though and, even if we're not unique, look at the footprint! This thing will run on little more than fresh air in modern terms, for goodness' sakes. I'd love to see an Amiga PDA...
Anyway, getting back to my original point, I've no idea about the technical side of things, but anything as nice to use as my old A1200 gets my vote. That wonderful, easy to use and understand shell and startup-sequence. Commodities. That icon system, especially with NewIcons or MagicWB. That lovely clean, clear, simple GUI. MUI. Directory Opus. OK, so I've just listed two add-ons, but I haven't found them elsewhere and I miss them
OK, I'm going on, but they were lovely. And anything even halfway that nice gets my vote and my money.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Strange laws in the US before it signed the Berne convention said that anything copyrighted must contain the words "copyright xxxx Copyright Owner" and be registered at the Copyright office. If you didn't do that, it was public domain. Since 1976, anything copyrightable is born copyrighted.
> Col. Sanders' secret blend of 11 herbs and spices
Flour, salt, pepper and MSG.
Really. That's it. The key is the way it's cooked, not the spices.
Perhaps I did misspeak myself, at least in the use of a catchy title. :-) My concern is that making it open source might not be enough to resuscitate it. If it's in a decrepit state, it might need a large team of paid engineers to bring it to the point where it can be used, praised, and worked on by all kinds of people -- just like Mozilla is today.
Let me try again with a definition of what I call the "Mozilla Effect": open source in an of itself is not the magic bullet by which excessively large chunks of previously proprietary code can achieve greatness; it's just a building block. You need to infuse a project with a large team of knowledgeable people with oodles of time on their hands to achieve the next step.
HTH, and I'm sorry if I misspoke.
I'm beginning to wonder about ESR. His quest to get any and all software on the face of the planet open sourced is noble, indeed. (I would love to see it.) But I think his credibility is beginning to be damaged every time he tells someone that ejecting an aging codebase into the 'net is going to magically resuscitate it.
To be fair, I haven't read the proposal yet, and I certainly don't have any idea what state the code is in. But I'd wager that it's in a similar state to the Communicator code when Mozilla was first launched: lots and lots of interesting code, but you can't really compile it into much.
Mozilla required almost complete rewriting with extensive corporate support to start shaping up as the awesome browser it will be. (One or two more Milestones, and I'll be happy to retire my well-worn copy of Communicator.) I wonder what AmigaOS will need, and if there is sufficient support to bring AmigaOS into the next millenium.
Adopt Amiga's message passing and asynchronous
I/O archicture for Linux, or some variant.
(also similar to NT completion ports)
Amiga's thread-based (Amiga called them processes,
but they were really threads) MessagePort
based I/O is lightyears easier to program
and more scalable than Linux select/poll(),
and POSIX AIO sucks, and SIGIO doesn't look
much better.
Basically, Amiga OS is deficient in every area (device independent graphics, memory protection, virtual memory, resource tracking, etc) except the one area where a real-time OS kicks ass, which is I/O.
Under AmigaOS, you could send off requests for thousands of different I/O requests and have buffers filled in by device drivers, and then
notify the threads that new data is available.
Almost zero-context switch overhead, no "copying" between kernel/user (device drivers would actually DMA data directly into your memory buffer if possible), which would lead to highly scalable servers.
Okay, I'll start by admitting a slight bias here. I started with an Amiga 1000, moved on to a 3000, used my brother's 500 while the 3000 was in the shop (CIA chip, of course), my brother bought a 1200, and a few months ago I traded some stereo equipment for a 2000.
I learned how to work with a CLI on an Amiga, and loved the integration with the GUI. The multitasking was great, and I still think it did many things better than any other OS out there.
But let us say that the OS is open sourced. What do we do with it? Am I wrong in thinking that it is so outdated that it would have to be completely rewritten? Is there something else we can get out of an open sourcing? Intellectual property rights maybe?
Maybe somebody could hack this thing into a window manager? Nico Francois, are you still out there? I want Powersnap under X.
The chipset isn't particularly interesting anymore, in this day of graphics chips running 600x faster than poor old Agnus/Alice, Paula, and Denise/Lisa, audio chips with more DSP performance than the fastest Amiga ever made, etc. It's important to know that the simulataneous screen resolution display was kind of hack, or chip limitation. Yes, there was a nice display list coprocessor that switched the screens. But the reason you could mix resolutions was the fact that the pixel clock was fixed at around 35ns. So every display ran 35ns, 70ns, or 140ns pixels. In a modern graphics card, you're mucking around with a PLL to independently vary refresh and resolution, and PLLs inherently take a more-than-scanline while to sync up to new frequencies. The cancelled Amiga Advanced Architecture project supported this trick by allowing up to four independent PLLs to exist in a system. But sure -- you can make an Amiga card for the PC. This was actually proposed twice while I was at Commodore, the first time it even made some sense (I did an engineering analysis). In practice? Look here: http://www.siamese.co.uk/pci-amiga-crew.html. The point, really, is "why bother". If you run an Amiga emulator on a reasonably fast PC, using the graphics API targeted to Windows or X, rather than Amiga chip emulation, you'll have an Amiga faster than any one that has ever existed in the real world. The OS, on the other hand, is still pretty damn cool. Some of you may recall a time when hacking was for fun, not profit. I think lots of people would love to hack the AmigaOS. It would be good, really, for an industry so caught up in ancient architectures like Windows and UNIX, to learn what AmigaOS has to teach. It's probably too late to make it anything that takes the world by storm, but that doesn't render it useless. In fact, most of the lessons of AmigaOS seem to have not made it into the PC mainsteam, whereas all of the hardware tricks did long ago, and then were soundly exceeded. As far as making new chips, a really sharp guy called Mick Tinker claims to have reimplemented the Amiga chips; don't know if he's using an FPGA or a true gate array (or possibly just simulating in VHDL or something). Of course, there's some extensions in there too; Amiga chips as they were implemeneted aren't terribly interesting today.
-Dave Haynie
In essence, I agree. People want this for fun. I still use a number of Canon and Leica rangefinder cameras, even in this day of digitals and SLRs smarter than any human. Because they're fun, because there's a degree of excellence there not available in today's "wonderbricks". AmigaOS is very much the same way.
Your details are wrong, though. AmigaOS was NOT "based on Tripos". The AmigaOS was largely original work. In order to get to market in time, Amiga had the DOS subsystem (a tiny piece of the greater whole) from Tripos ported to the existing AmigaOS. That's the only Tripos connection.
-Dave Haynie
I found a fast warez site: http://warez.it.kth.se
We have now seen company after company go down the drain, after promising us one wonder amiga after another. But the question that I am asking myself is, will the Amiga curse spead to Open Source if AOS is open sourced? And what would happen if Micro$oft bought Amiga?
For some reason I see a lot of negative reactions from people when they see any mention of the Amiga going open source.
To start with, I have friends who have been saying for the past 6 years that the Amiga is dead, the fact that they are still have to say it to me is an indication that it is not dead. If the Amiga really were dead then we wouldn't be talking about it now.
Secondly, a lot of people are saying that it would be impossible to bring the Amiga up-to-date, because it's lacking this, or that. From what I know about it, the only thing it's lacking is memory protection and the AROS (www.aros.org) project is working on that already.
The AROS project has already built an Amiga compatible cross-platform Exec (the Amigas multitasking kernel to those who don't know). The AROS Exec can already boot on both PCs and Amigas, what AROS is missing is all of the Amigas extras and utilities. If the AmigaDos code were open-sourced, it may become possible to merge the AROS code and the AmigaDos code giving everybody in a small amount of time a new alternative open-source operating system.
I know a lot of people here are die-hard Linux fans, who are afraid of having more than one open-source operating system, they seem to think that all deviation from the path of Linux is some kind of heresy. I think differently, I think that in order for open-source operating systems to truly flourish there must be competition between very different operating systems.
There are still many good things about the Amiga.
Efficiency, multitasking with very little memory.
System of datatypes.
System wide macro language, a single interpreted language can be used to get all of the Amigas applications to talk to one another
Extendibility, if something's not already in the operating system, it can be added on, like TCP/IP, graphics/sound card drivers, virtual memory, PC/UNIX/Mac filesystems etc., there's none of that recompiling your kernel rubbish whenever you add some new hardware.
I really love my Amiga and I would really love to see the Amiga go open-source, because I, and many thousands of people like me, would work on making AmigaDos the best operating system once again.
You can stab it, shoot it, poison it, drown it, and let the platform wither with neglect, but IT JUST WON'T DIE!!!!
This isn't intended to be a troll (I really don't know the answer), but how much cool stuff was in Amiga anyways that we can't get out of today's operating systems? I know that Amiga was way ahead of it's time for 1985 (I, with my lowly Apple IIc, drooled with envy at my friend Ken's Amiga 1000), but wouldn't it be simpler at this point, technically speaking, to try and duplicate the Amiga's best features in Linux, BeOS, or MacOS X?
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Why bother?
Why does anyone ever bother? Because they find it fun.
Why do some people renovate old cars? Do they believe that it'll really outperform a modern car?
No. They are having fun, damn the usefullness of it.
I would find it fun to poke around in the guts of the OS that I 'grew-up' on.
And to all those people saying "it's so old and unless, we have all this new stuff now, and the Amiga is sooo old."
Duh! That's _why_ we'd want it Open Sourced, then it can be altered to run on XYZ super hardware.
"Ohhh, but Linux is already there", yeah, and a few years back you could have said "why bother with Linux, Amiga is already there".
Do these people who ask such questions use anything old at all? Do they refuse to read old books because "they're so out of date, and they don't use modern book printing technology, and the paper is a bit yellow - so it must be useless".
The Amiga was based on Tripos, a unix-alike, which is why familier things like crypt() crop up in the kernel, which is why it had proper multitasking. It _was_ unix with a GUI. Yes - it does have some major holes compared to current OS's - big gaping holes ----- so what's the best way to fix them? Yes, finally, are you seeing the light, are you catching on -- the best way to fix it is to Open Source it. If it were perfect then what would be the point?
Yes, it's out of date, yes some people will find it fun to update it, and yes, some won't.
Err, rant, rave, etc.
The complete 'C' source code for the Amiga's Intuition code was released to the public domain back in the late 1980's. It was released on the Copperstate PD disk series. I think it was either disk #14 or Disk #24. I have it on one of my DAT tapes. I still own two amiga 2000's. But you just can't get replacement hardware anymore. I hope they release the Source so the emulator writers can improve the amiga emulators. They just aren't good enough yet. I have tons of cool amiga software that I would love to run under an emulator under Linux.
Open the Source!
Maybe Microsoft can learn how a real operating system is written! (no offense to Linux).
The Truth is a Virus!!!
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS BOTH A GEEK WALK THROUGH MEMORY LANE AND ACTUAL TECH ANALYSIS. IT'S MY POST, AND I CAN WRITE WHAT I PLEASE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.
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I'm as surprised as...well, I guess none of you have any reason to be surprised. But I've never owned an Amiga; hell, I've barely even seen one.
OK, so I grew up drooling over the concept of having a pimped out Amiga system, and can completely identify with the rabidly loyal Amiga community(I had an Apple IIgs and lived in the city Applefest used to be held in. 'Nuff said.)
And, now that I think about it, a very large proportion of the music I grew up listening to was downloaded to my IIgs via a 2400 baud modem, straight from Aminet sites. Ah, yes, the good old days of blasting data through *FSP*(does anyone else remember this beautiful little hack of a UDP protocol?) so I could get around FTP user limits...not to mention, downloading to my system that didn't even possess a hard drive! 800K floppiez, K-RAD 3133+...;-)
No, but I think the real reason I've been loving Amiga's lately is this comic strip I found off of Memepool--it's called Sabrina; the archives are here, and this is undoubtedly one of the most dementedly weird strips I've ever seen.
It's joined User Friendly and After Y2K(mmm..TTB...mmm...NTZC...) for "gotta read it" value. Imagine this strip about a bunch of Amiga-addict Anthropormophized Kitten/Skunk/Squirrels-Cum-Hot Chicks who have lives that traverse the range of Web Site Designer for Porno Director to pregnancy.
I really can't describe how strange of a geek strip this is. It's definitely geek. It's obsessively geek. In someone else's hands, it'd be Geek Sold Out. In this guy's hands...just go. Go now.
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Oh, yeah. The Amiga. The point that the Amiga was an insanely efficient OS with 512K ram should be muted by the fact that there was significant amounts of extremely useful custom hardware embedded within that system. I think one of the slowest realizations the industry is going to eventually come to grips with is that general purpose processors are really f*cking slow at many tasks, at least compared to hardwired solutions.
Just consider how many Pentium III's you'd need to match a Voodoo 3 at bilinearly filtering the texture coatings for large amounts of polygons.
One of the major things I'm looking forward to seeing out of Transmeta is the degree to which they've bridged the specialty opcode vs. general purpose architecture divide that's somewhat divided the industry over the last few years. I'm tremendously interested, for example, in if we're going to see things like Routing and Firewall Opcodes dynamically programmable into the Transmeta CPU.
If Transmeta doesn't do it, those guys with that mass FPGA programming language will. Sooner or later, we're going to have hardware morph itself into the configurations various applications and utilities require. Should be interesting to watch.
What do you guys think?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
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