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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."
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.
A derivative of AmigaOS would be great for tiny palmtops and etc that don't have MMU's. As a general purpose OS it's not so great nowdays due to lack of VM support, but being written for a non-MMU environment is actually an advantage when you're trying to make it run on some embedded processor that doesn't HAVE an MMU. Linux can be hacked to run in such environments, but not well. AmigaOS thrives in the non-MMU environment (well, as well as can be done in such an environment!), and its low resource usage means that you could get away with crappier hardware than with, say, WinCE (wince!).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
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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