These are the main goals:
There has been some talks about writing something which is something like an advanced OS with the features of the AmigaOS. This has been dropped and for good reason. First, everyone agrees that the current AmigaOS should be enhances but no one knows how to do that or even agrees on what has to be enhanced or what is important. Some want memory protection but don't want to pay the price (major rewrite of the available software and speed cut-offs).
In the end, the discussions ended in either flame wars or "do it this way ! - Won't work because !". So we just said: First we do something we know to handle. Then we have the experience to decide what is possible and how. And then we decide.
No. a) If it was that important, it would be in the OS already :-) b) Why don't you do it yourself and send it to us ?
See, there are plenty of people around who think that their feature is the most important and that "the AmigaOS has no future if this feature is not built in right now". We say: The AmigaOS' demise has nothing to do with missing features. The AmigaOS can do everything a modern OS should do. We see that there are possibilities to enhance the AmigaOS but if we do it, who would write the rest of the OS ? In the end, we would have lots of nice improvements to the original AmigaOS which would break most of the available software and worth nothing, because the OS itself would be missing. So we decided to block every attempt to implement major new features in the OS until it's more or less done.
AROS is Mailware as defined in the AFD-COPYRIGHT. This means that you have to write a postcard or email to us if you use AROS. The use of AROS is free.
If you want to use AROS' code in your project, you have to pay for this code if you earn money with the result. For PD developers, the code is still free.
Most compatible. We expect that AROS will run existing software on the Amiga without problems. On other hardware (like PCs), the existing software must be recompiled. We will offer a preprocessor which you can use on your code which will change any code that might break with AROS and/or warn you about such code.
Currently AROS is only available for Intel PCs with Linux (Linux/i386). We are working on versions for Linux/m68k (ie. Amiga, Mac and Atari with Linux) and of course on the Amiga version.
UAE is an A500 emulator. It's goals differ somewhat from that of AROS: UAE wants to be able to be binary compatible even for games and hardware banging code while AROS wants to have native applications. Therefore AROS is much fast than UAE but UAE has more software.
We are in loose contact with the author of UAE and there is a good chance that code for UAE will appear in AROS and vice versa. For example, UAE is interested in the source for the OS because it could run some apps much faster if it could replace the OS calls by native code. On the other hand, AROS needs hardware drivers (eg. audio.device).
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at digulla@aros.fh-konstanz.de . 03 Feb 1997