[iyonix-support] RISC OS platforms (was Iyonix 2 or not)
- From: "Peter Naulls" <peter@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: iyonix-support@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:55:40 -0700
[Sorry, breaking threading here, I'm having to reply via GMail]
Jean Louchet wrote:
> Hi,
>
> well, if Castle's decision towards closing down is irrevocable, let me
> come back to Peter Naull's statement yesterday:
That would be "Peter Naulls' statement", if you please.
> 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.
>
> To begin with, I must confess I am pretty incompetent in these
> matters. However, I understand Castle's position being reluctant to
> give away for free RiscOS5 which is the result of their work at a
> cost. I amy be out of the way (and then I am pretty confident you
> will tell me) but why not create what is called in UK a "Charity" (in
> France it would be "association a but non lucratif selon la loi de
> 1901", we republicans love complicated expressions) where the people
> interested would place some reasonable amount of money in order to buy
> the rights from Castle and give the suitable rights to ensure a future
> to RiscOS?
Firstly, I must again insist upon accuracy, and that means the
correct name of the OS is "RISC OS". Secondly, the point here is
licensing. Any talk of charity or (if you'll excuse the phrase,
and not wanting to get into a political discussion) socialist
ideals misses the point.
Under an OSS compatible situation, Castle is not "giving away" RISC OS;
they most definitely retain their full copyright ownership as well
as the right to license it under alternate terms to anyone else
they please (cf. the MySQL model). The problem with the current
licensing situation is threefold - firstly, the wording (IMHO)
is rather ambiguous - AFAICT, it limits its usage to hobbyist
home users, although that's not entirely clear. Secondly, it
can't be combined or linked in novel ways with other OSS software.
And finally, it's not free (in the OSS sense), which is distinctly
off-putting to any outside parties who want to contribute, and probably
in almost every case will simply not take a second look given that.
I suggest the Apache, Netscape or BSD licenses - these are in widespread
use, compatible with the GPL, but do not posses the various stigmas of
the GPL or its various ambiguities. The LGPL is also a strong
contender for various parts of RISC OS. Perhaps your argument
is that CTL might be more inclined down this path given a
financial infusion - I don't know.
In any case, what we have now, as I said, is a non-starter for any
progression of RISC OS. If at least there was a RiscPC version
of RISC OS under the current license, that would be a huge step
forward.
Terje Slettebø wrote:
> Hi all.
port.
> There are of course numerous ARM-powered devices around, but I've
> concentrated my search on the high-end ARM processors, so to speak, in
> particular the latest ARM generation known as ARM Cortex. This one - in
> particular the A-series (for "Application Processor") - has several
> advantages to the Xscale architecture, such as having an FPU (yes!) and 3D
> graphics acceleration.
Certainly, but there's one (perhaps two, if we look at older
hardware such as the Jornada) machine which is a complete system and
would arguably constitute a usable machine. Having RISC OS on
a board might be interesting to a hacker, but unless it's a
complete product, it's of dubious use to a RISC OS enthusiast. Any
additional hardware work is going to add considerable cost to any
product.
> - Pandora (http://www.openpandora.org/) - Uses the OMAP3530 ARM Cortex A8
> processor. A game console running Linux
Yes, and to the best of my knowledge, this is the only present
reasonable choice.
After all, you don't need a "Linux computer" to run
> Linux (all the above computers run Linux, for one thing). Maybe this is
> where RISC OS's future lies: Portability to different hardware (as also
> Peter Naulls focused on). That is, if it does _have_ a future (running
> natively, not just emulated), and that's what we want, isn't it?
I don't think I've either focussed on that or necessarily implied
that its future lies there (but plenty of arguments have been
made that this is so). What I've outlined are realistic and
achievable options, and the current roadblocks. However, what's
imperative is that RISC OS breaks outside its current traditional
hardware. And trust me, writing drivers is a time-consuming
and tedious task. We want to avoid if at all possible.
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