After the release of OS4 and looking around I came up with these questions which I would like to share with the community:
1.How compatible MorphOS will be with the next versions of AmigaOS?
2.Why not AOS4 & MorphOS use the same standards?
3.What is the future of MUI??
4.What are the chances to take those two OSes two different directions, and how will effect us?

Please take the post seriously and please do not start any flames...

Both teams have different approaches of
offering the amiga-system we want. So I
doubt there is room for using both syste,s
at the same time. The personal opinions of both
teams have been made public quite often and
from what was said cooperation will not happen.
Thats it. No need to think on this any further.

The effect for the future is that we will see two
different niches that share a few programs/components
like AHI/MUI etc but not the core elements of
the OSs ... we have the same root, but at a
certain level we grow in differnt directions.

"1.How compatible MorphOS will be with the next versions of AmigaOS?"

I guess that the OS's will be developed acording to the different approaches and design philosophies of the two respective team. It's then up to the application programmers to add compatibility or support for either of the two. A program that is written to work on "real" Amigas (read: Commodore/Escom hardware with OS3.1, PUP/WUP/68k) but independent from legacy HW and system friendly, thus using RTG, RTA, etc, should also run fine on MorphOS and OS4, even the PowerUP/WarpUP ones. The classic AmigaOS API could be seen as the common reference point, and could be used as a base for any software development. Any MorphOS/OS4 specific functionality is optional for the developer to decide upon.

My personal view is that the Amiga compatibility (with *real* amigas) has given the MorphOS a flying start, but I don't support the idea of wasting time, effort and resources in order to try to keep MorphOS compatible with OS4. Put that time, effort and resources in leveraging MorphOS in its own way instead. OS4 is not important and not relevant for MorphOS's future.


"2.Why not AOS4 & MorphOS use the same standards?"

They are two OS's that's being developed by two different crews, that has two fundamentally different views on lots of things when it comes to OS design. There was this "Open Amiga" idea (their website seems to be dead BTW) to create a common set of standards for application developers to make it easy to write programs that could easily be ported between MorphOS, AROS, and OS4. It will ultimately be up to each application programmer to decide how they want to do however.


"3.What is the future of MUI??"

What do you mean? IMHO, MUI is quite good as it is already, and I believe the future of MUI is quite bright. Haven't you seen "the two circles" video for instance, where you can change colors etc and view the results in realtime?


"4.What are the chances to take those two OSes two different directions, and how will effect us?"

See the above comments.

WARNING: Following text should be considered as my opinion. It's unofficial, and based on pure speculation.

1., MorphOS will not be compatible. It's normal, since it has it's own way. And for second, MorphOS was first, and it was expected to be the next version of AmigaOS. Due to historical reasons, this could not happen. Later, Hyperion started their work, and they took "official" AmigaOS development into another direction. That's their decision, and should not affect MorphOS, which was already a working/usable system at the time when OS4 development started.

2., They're sharing some standards. The last "standard" in Amiga world was the 3.1 API, definied by Commodore. Both OSes support that. Also they both support CGFX API (in OS4 with a wrapper) and AHI, which are de-facto standards for developers on Amiga since years. Same for WarpOS/Warp3D, and a few other API's, like MUI (version 3.8). They even share the same executable format (ELF32) even though the ABI (binary interface) is different. So there are standards if you want to build software which runs on both systems.

3., I don't know what' the future of MUI in OS4. But in MorphOS it's already used as the default OS GUI kit, and i'm sure it will be continously upgraded and enhanced.

4., The two OS already goes into two different directions, and this affects the whole community. When the new API's (for memory protection, DOS, etc) will be introduced, the gap between MOS and OS4 will be widening more rapidly.

I see OS4 and MOS already forming their communities. They're already two different worlds, and they are against eachother in development philosophy, vision of future, and lot of other aspects. Currently i hope MOS will won "the battle" for the market, because it has far better hardware (the Pegasos) for it, while A1 boards are not something you expect as a modern system for the future... And i've a few other things against the way OS4 builds up, but thoose are only does matter for programmers, not for average users.

I think, it's a bit funny that Pegasos/MOS are currently better than AmigaOne/OS4, to wittness the technical superiority and elegance of systems built after something we can maybe call the "Amiga-philosophy". Again, this is only my opinion.

@Chain-Q

Please explain your point of view as developer

Quote:
Only two OSes?
There is four:
MOS, OS4, AROS and WB 3.1
So I guess that if a developer want´s maximum portability he will develop for the featureset of WB3.1 now and maybe AROS in the future.
Kind of like POSIX I suppose.

If developers wants to use the new features of the OSes then it´s ofcourse going to be os-specific programs. That isn´t necessarily a bad thing.

Quote:

MorphOS is 3.1 compatible.
OS4 is 3.1 compatible (with a couple of exceptions)
AROS is a 3.1 reimplementation.
WB 3.1 is part of AmigaOS3.1.

Result: There are only 2 OS taking different directions, not 4.

AROS is starting to carve it's own path, the Workbench 3.1 API is the base rather than the whole

Quote:

MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 are already incompatible in binary and source level. They are compatible through AmigaOS 3.1 only.

Quote:

It wouldn't make sense... goals for AOS4 and MOS are different. Albeit the ultimate goal for them both is dropping AOS 3.1 support some day.

Quote:

They are growing apart already and in the future we only see more exclusive software... 68k AmigaOS is pretty dead now and not many developers bother with 68k ports anymore.