[iyonix-support] RISC OS 5 source opening

I'll avoid adding to the silliness about the Iyonix ceasing
production.  6 years is a very long
time for any piece of electronics, and should not be a surprise to
anyone.   The reality
is that producing any new hardware with supporting drivers, OS etc, etc is an
enormous undertaking, and the current situation should not really, be
a surprise -
RISC OS history is littered with plenty of examples of that.

Anyway, my concern is much more with RISC OS 5 itself.  We still have
a situation
where it's impossible for a 3rd party to produce a version of RISC OS 5 to run
on alternate hardware (e.g. the Pandora project, which is a pretty nice target
for RISC OS), due to incomplete release of source code. Or indeed make a
RiscPC version of RISC OS 5, which is of particular interest for distribution
with RPCEmu, and would enable lots of people to try out RISC OS.

The current emulation solution for RISC OS involves Windows, which myself
and plenty of others are loathe to use as a supporting OS.  A cut down
and fully-controlled Linux makes vast amounts more sense.

So, I urge Castle again to consider and hasten the licensing situation.  Not
only with complete RISC OS 5 sources, but to remove the stifling licensing
conditions (i.e, non-OSS compatible terms)  which not only prevent a
variety of innovation (see David Given's work in csa.p) but also strongly
put off all but the most die-hard RISC OS developers, and certainly not
outside interest as Castle perhaps hoped for originally.   There was plenty
of evidence from other projects that have not fully embraced OSS that
this gambit simply wouldn't work, but there's still time for Castle to
rectify this.

With apologies for formatting, I'm using GMail.
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