[softwarelist] Re: OPW - Enhanced justification

In message <c009ce0550.Jo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, John Tytgat <John.Tytgat@xxxxxxxx> writes 
Emulation has a tendency to preserve the status quo - you can carry on

This risks to be become off topic but all the bug fixing and functionality
enhancements done in Select/Adjust and RISC OS 6 doesn't seem to confirm
this tendency.  Moreover, I'm not aware of any RISC OS 5 development during
the last years and it remains still to be seen if ROOL can make a difference
to this.
I think we're about to find out. The situation now is RISC OS Ltd. (ROSL) selling an operating system that is going to be mostly used on an emulator - Virtual Acorn (VA).
The exciting thing is the point at which the emulator becomes an alternative operating system for the PC platform.
As I see it VA and ROSL have two potential markets, traditional RISC OS users who want to use software 20 years old, and the rest of the world who are fed up with Windows and would like a different operating system.
At the moment their efforts are devoted to the first, but that market is doomed. The other market is hugely valuable and if they made any progress in it they'd be fabulously rich. They're between the devil and the land of milk and honey.
Those faced with this dilemma in the past (e.g Acorn) have waited for the devil.
Given the choice between something which would make RISC OS more modern but break old software ROSL+VA will go with the old software.
About the best you can say is that with an emulator you could arrange things so that old software continued to work in the presence of new features. 


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David Pilling
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