AROS
The Amiga Replacement OS
(C) 1996 AROS - The Amiga Replacement OS
Some time back in the year 1993, the situation for the Amiga looked somewhat worse (doesn't it always ?) and some Amiga fans got together and argued about what was to do to increase the acceptance for our beloved machine. Immediately the main reason for the missing success of the Amiga has been found: It's propagation or the lack thereof. The Amiga must become a more widespread basis to make it more attractive for everyone - for the users and the developers. So plans were made to reach this goal. During this effort, all bugs of the OS of the Amiga should be fixed and it should become an OS of the 90s. AOS was born.
But what is a bug ? And how should they be fixed ? What's the thing a so-called modern OS must have ? And how should they be implemented into the Amiga OS ?
Two years later, people were still arguing about this and not even one line of code had been written (or at least no one had ever seen that code). And discussions were still of the pattern "we must have..." and someone answered "read the old mails" or "this is impossible to do, because" which was shortly followed by "you're wrong because" and this one was ripped apart and so on.
In the winter of 1995, I (Aaron Digulla) was fed up with it and I posted an RFC (request for comments) to the AOS mailing list in which I asked what the minimal common ground might be. Several options were given and the conclusion was that almost everyone would like to see an OS which is compatible to OS 3.1 (Kickstart 40.68) on which further discussions could be based upon to see what is possible and what is not.
So the work began and AROS was born.
AROS' goal is it to create an OS which
- is as compatible as possible to AmigaOS 3.1
- can be ported to different kinds of CPUs, for example Intel x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA and more.
- should be binary compatible on Amiga and source compatible on any other hardware
- can run as a standalone version which boots directly from harddisk, as an emulation which opens a window on an existing OS to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time and as a link library which allows to create native applications with the comfort of the AmigaOS
To reach this goal, we use a number of techniques. First of all, we make heavy use of the Internet. You can participate in our project even if you can write only one single OS function. The most current version of the source is accessible 24h per day and patches can be merged into it at any time. A small database with open tasks prevents all developers from doing something twice.
This is the current developer list. Please note that the EMail addresses of all developers but the coordinator are missing. The reason for this is that we want to protect the developers from junk mail. If you have something to ask or say, contact coordinator digulla@aros.fh-konstanz.de.
- Aaron Digulla (Coordinator)
- Matthias Fleischer (Exec, DOS, drivers)
- Peter Boeckmann (Sparc, Alpha)
- Iain Templeton (FreeBSD, utility)
- Peter Bortas (WWW site)
- Martin Recktenwald (WWW, layers)
- Lennard voor den Dag (Amiga port, layers)
- Chris Lawrence (Linux/m68k)
- Geert Uytterhoeven (Linux/m68k)
- Kars de Jong (misc)
- Nils Henrik Lorentzen (diskfont,icons)
- Stefan Ruppert (Datatypes)
- Harald Frank (Amiga port)
- Martin Steigerwald (Beta tester)
- Sebastian Rittau (Includes, Gadtools)
- L. A. Guest (CLI tools)
- Johan Alfredsson (Commodities)
- Stefan Berger (Math libs)
- Jesper Skov (Linux/m68k)
- Wez Furlong (Shell)
- Stefan Reinauer
- Christopher D. Judd
- Tommy Johansson
- Paolo Costabel
- Daniel Verite
- Michael Roth
- Nico Heinz
- Bernhard Fastenrath
- Thomas Schwarz
- Yannick Koehler
- Hans Van Ingelgom
- Ross Cohen
- Janos Farkas
- Morten Holm
- Henning Kiel
There is a total of 1109 functions.
485 (43.73%) are still todo.
143 (12.89%) are currently in work.
481 (43.37%) are completed.
| Job | Count | Todo | In work | Completed |
|---|
| alib_stdio | 7 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| arp | 59 | 96.61% | 3.39% | 0.00% |
| asl | 6 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| commodities | 26 | 0.00% | 34.62% | 65.38% |
| console | 2 | 50.00% | 0.00% | 50.00% |
| datatypes | 15 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| diskfont | 5 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| dos | 154 | 38.96% | 5.19% | 55.84% |
| exec | 118 | 0.85% | 6.78% | 92.37% |
| gadtools | 19 | 0.00% | 63.16% | 36.84% |
| graphics | 163 | 69.94% | 4.29% | 25.77% |
| icon | 12 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| iffparse | 40 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| intuition | 124 | 59.68% | 3.23% | 37.10% |
| layers | 32 | 0.00% | 56.25% | 43.75% |
| locale | 24 | 0.00% | 12.50% | 87.50% |
| mathffp | 12 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| mathieeedoubbas | 12 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| mathieeedoubtrans | 17 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| mathieeesingbas | 12 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| mathieeesingtrans | 17 | 0.00% | 52.94% | 47.06% |
| mathtrans | 17 | 0.00% | 5.88% | 94.12% |
| utility | 38 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
There is a total of 54 other things.
9 (16.67%) are still todo.
38 (70.37%) are currently in work.
7 (12.96%) are completed.
A snapshot of the window of demowin This window is opened with the demowin demo program. It opens a window and renders some graphics in it. You can click on the gadgets and the program will tell you which gadget has been pressed. If you press the gadget with the label "Complement", the sizes for the PropGadgets will change. You can press a key and the program will show you the string which is associated with that key. You can press the left, middle and right mousebutton to draw lines in the window. To exit the demo, press the Escape key or click on one of the "Exit" gadgets at the bottom.
A snapshot of readicon This shows the output of readicon. In the big window, you can see debugging and informational output of the program. The small window shows the normal and selected state of an icon and contains a gadget which has the icons' images for its normal and selected images.
These are things which are still to do:
- Use SDE - one binary which runs on any AROS hardware
- Ports to PPC, HHPA, Sparc and Alpha
Several people asked us about to use parts of AROS or license the whole thing, for example to give it along with a new computer. Here are the preliminary ideas we have about how much we want for it. Note that our basic intentions are simply to provide the computer community with a good OS and to prevent anyone to make money with our hard work.
- You are a PD developer or you ask no extra fee for AROS
-
Then AROS is of course free for you, too. It doesn't matter if you use part of AROS or the whole. All we ask is that you mention us.
If you sell computers with AROS, you don't have to pay anything extra if the price for the machine with AROS is the same as without it.
- You want to use part of core of AROS for a commercial or shareware product
-
Then you have to pay $1 (one dollar) per 10 lines of code or $1 (one dollar), whichever is more. You always have to pay for the whole module with the code in it (core modules always contain only one function per module). Comments count as code. If you want to calculate the cost of some source, get the most recent version from an official source (eg. Aminet or the AROS-FTP-Server) and use the UN*X command "wc -l" on the parts you want. Then divide the result by 10 (rounding up). For example, the complete Exec has at the time of the writing of this text 12409 lines. That would cost you $1241.
The price has to be paid only once and it allows you to use all future versions of that module in your code, so you also have bought all bugfixes and enhancements. You may use your copy in any way you want.
- You want the whole thing and pay per sold unit
-
In this case, the price for AROS is 50% of the difference to the unit without AROS. So your computer costs $1000 without and you ask $100 for AROS, we want $50 from you. This license doesn't include the right to modify the AROS source but it means that you can sell AROS and make profit from it.
- You want the whole thing and pay only once
-
If you take everything, you have to pay half the price of all sources in AROS/config/and AROS/rom/. That would be $2615 for 52301 lines of code at the time of the writing of the text. For this price, you get a copy of the source and the right to modify and/or sell it as you wish.
Updates to AROS are not free, though, but cheap. Each update costs $100, no matter how big the update is. We define an update as a release of AROS with a new version number. You only pay for updates you use, so you can skip several releases and pay still only $100 when you want the new source.
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If you have comments or suggestions, email me at
digulla@aros.fh-konstanz.de.
13. Aug 1997
