With the renewed interest in AmigaOS thanks to the new Pegasos2 version there has been some comparisons of AmigaOS and MorphOS on the same hardware starting to appear. Better late than never I suppose.

This got me thinking, whatever happened to the original MorphOS goals?

I remember being excited about the future of MorphOS as a new platform with new ideas that could leapfrog AmigaOS entirely. This was back before www.morphos.net started pointing to pissed off developers.

Here is a sample from web.archive.org of what I'm talking about:
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Link: http://web.archive.org/web/20020626180435/http://www.morphos.net/kernelinfo.php3

The Q-Box looked exciting and fresh as well:
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Link: http://web.archive.org/web/20020626181353/http://www.morphos.net/overview.php3

So what happened to MorphOS that caused it to become little more than an enhanced A-Box?

There are a lot of exciting features in that list that are not possible on the A-Box.

Here is how I see it personally:

To be any good ABox had to be finished first, and be of high quality. That took a very long time.

QBox, (or rather several different OSes running at the same time which was the bigger plan, something like highly efficient vmware) would have required major overhaul for drivers and such (you wouldn't have been able to run them inside ABox obviously). Basically it would have required way more resources than were available. The commercial (as in making a living just coding this stuff) side of things pretty much dying didn't help either.

So, rather than taking the very very hard route we instead chose to expand the ABox side. Yes, it doesn't allow some of the wildest dreams of the QBox thing, but it still is very good.

Am I in any way disappointed in all this? Not really. Even with "just" ABox, MorphOS still kicks serious behind and is great fun.

[ Edited by Piru on 2009/2/18 3:56 ]

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Well... thanks for this (nice) refreshed MorphOS "manifest".

It is good to know, every bit of time, your motivation and what someone from the Core Dev Team thinks for the present and the future of MorphOS.

It would be better a regular, say quarterly or so , progress update but, in any case, we will forgive you, as long as you "kick serious behind"...


[ Edited by ZB on 2009/2/18 13:42 ]

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Amen Piru!
MorphOS philosofy in a nutshell!

More so what happen to this?

"Symmetrical multi processing (SMP)"

:)

@Painkiller

I don't think that was planned for ABox.

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MorphOS rules!

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Very nice information, Piru, it's indeed welcome.
Several days ago, Chris Hodges hinted something mythical: "MorphOS 3.0". He was talking about some changes in the USB handling.
Could you add some information about this? Why does this MorphOS release deserve a new major version number, instead of, say, 2.3?

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What happened was that Laire got an Xbox...

@jcmarcos

Did he happen to give a release date as well?

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Mac Mini support.

Has the MorphOS team ever given a release date before releasing anything? 8^)

Piru, could you please answer my previous questions?

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Also a 2.3 release is on schedule to be released soon (according to F.M.).

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That seems most likely from the responses so far.

Since we are offering opinions, I'll hazard a guess as to what really happened. I think Laire and company failed to deliver and squashed MorphOS (remember Laire declared it dead) as a platform. Genesi helped things along considerably by failing to pay everybody. Some of the devs that invested countless hours in the dream quickly banded together and convinced Laire to let them continue on the A-Box so they could at least try and recover some cash owed by selling licenses. Now, what is left of the original dev team is content to sell a few licenses and not worry about advancing MorphOS with any of the features originally promised back in 2002. The end.

I suppose as long as it is bringing in cash it doesn't matter what the plan was.

@SSolie

except that you're quite mistaken about the "bringing cash" leitmotiv. MorphOS isn't done by a company as such, and its development is not really driven by sales. For most ppl in the team, it's more about hobby and fun.

The fact that 2.x is sold can be seen as a way to finance further platforms support and included sw licenses, but profit isn't really the aim there (it would be quite crazy to hope making profits in such a niche, really :)).


[ Edited by Fab on 2009/2/19 18:49 ]

@ssolie
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You guessed wrong.

@jcmarcos

The development MorphOS branch is called MorphOS 3. It's a number that comes after 2.

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Failed to deliver?



No other Amiga NG OS developers has delivered as much Amiga compatibility, as much new features, as modern user experience, as much performance, as fast progress, etc, etc as the MorphOS team. They were first, they are best, and they are still going.

Nowhere is MorphOS as a platform squashed, and never did they fail to deliver.

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What he said back when Gerber made his kamikaze stunt and nuked his Ambient desktop was that he saw a different future for MorphOS than desktop (and you must remember that it was at a time of great frustration for many people). IMHO this was (and still is) a sensible conclusion, even though the Ambient development later could continue as an open source project. I think MorphOS can still have a commercial future, but hardly as a traditional desktop OS.

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The Pretory/Thendic blowout was indeed bad for everyone, but it was inevitable at that point. However, as everyone can see, MorphOS is still here, better than ever, and the developers remaining are here for the love of the OS. Sure, things could happen faster with full time developers on a payroll compared to a hobby project, but that wasn't possible. Salary must come from sales, and there isn't any business based on MorphOS. But Genesi continue to sponsor MorphOS developmnet in small ways and AFAIK they paid for the Efika port, and I'm sure they'll come to some agreement with the MorphOS team if they ever releases new PPC hardware some time in the future. As has been proved, coming to such agreements is very much possible.

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I think it's obvious to most people here that you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.

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Those features, Memory Protection, SMP etc, are *Quark* features, things that can't exist in a traditional Amiga context. Quark is there, but it's merely a micro kernel, nothing more. The "A-box" is a Quark process, and this "A-box" is what everyone here is interested in, it's why we are here. And it has been advancing in a most impressive manner, and it still is. The 2.0 release last summer was a giant leap, followed up with a 2.1 and later 2.2 with several new features. A 2.3 version is around the corner, as well as a "3.0" or whatever the Mac version will be called. *Lot's* of things are happening, and if you fail to see that you must be blind.

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MorphOS 2 has sold, what, 500 copies? And you think it's all about the money?

@ssolie

So how are those benchmarks coming along?

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...and after 3 comes 4! In a matter of time we'll beat OS4 also on release number, not only on performance!

@ssolie

Your trolling attempts are very funny, please, continue.

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Trying to get rich selling an 80s-like OS (no memory protection, no automatic stack enlargement, no SMP) is not a good target market plan. It would be as ridiculous as trying to charge 500Euros for a L2cache-less sub Ghz computer.

Call me when you have automatic stack enlargement, multiuser and *full* memory protection working on your favourite OS... watching the presentation slides it should be available from a long time

I hope you are happy with Pegasos2 as now you'll be able to use 2GB of ram easily and disable your slow swap memory.

[ Edited by Crumb on 2009/2/19 22:45 ]

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Or maybe you want to ignore that among the answers, some come from Harry 'Piru' Sintonen, one of the core members of the MorphOS team. I doubt his is just an opinion or an educated guess: I think he knows something about MorphOS development...

Kind regards,
Andrea

Ssolie

Firstly I'm glad you started this interesting thread. Secondly, you dont know wtf you are talking about

The one thing you forget to consider in your guesses about Morphos develpment is that a lot of the core team actually USE MORPHOS! So not only to support the lame ass - amiga/morphos userbase but also for them to run cool sh*T.

MorphOS is TEH RAEL OS!Q!!!!!1

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Indeed. But I'd like to know... Is Ralph "laire" Schimidt still working in MorphOS? He's never been very comunicative (genius programmers communicate with computers, not people), so it's hard to know.
Also, it can be implied that every change in MorphOS occurs above Quark (Laire's creature), so perhaps he isn't involved because it's not really needed.

How wrong am I?