>The reality is that each individual MorphOS component is the property of its individual developer, as could be seen by tokai's unfortunate departure.

Yes, that was an ugly situation, wasn't it?
Perhaps they ought to consider asking all current contributors to sign a contract that covers the rights to that code.

>The vast majority of the code that comprises MorphOS should be easily recompilable for any ISA, so even if there were no further PPC versions of MorphOS as soon as an x64 version arrives, the MorphOS team wouldn't have to "ash can" the majority of the code written so far.

Not nearly as simple a process as you assume, or we already would have seen a proof of concept demo.

>only laire (still active?), bigfoot and piru have the necessary skills to pull off the ISA transition.

I think you might have just slighted Frank Mariak with that statement, one of two developers who was there at the start. And Mark is pretty busy with work on the current OS, so who's that leave in your list Harry and one other developer that you don't appear to be sure is actually still working on the OS?

>This I doubt.

I don't. The best developer in the list you mentioned is already committed to several new projects for the current OS.

>I just linked to the Leopard WebKit author who has been harping on Bigfoot's progress with the JavaScript JIT project

Yeah, I know, but I enjoy needling you every once in a while buddy, and you did bring it up...;-(
Besides, I would SO like to jettison all my reliance on that piece of dung.
Java, Flash, and any other buggy, unreliable crap I've been forced to use for the last couple of decades or so.

And, as I pointed out, I'm quite impressed with what's been done so far, so when we do make this move, I'll be retaining my last PPC system (which is likely to be an X5000) as an example of the "high water mark" we reached with this.

You know, there are a few things we are likely to see before this move that will be quite neat.
Bigfoot's committed to upgrading all those Radeon drivers that were introduced after the R500s, and if he can do all that work, I'll bow to him in obeisance.
That means, that unlike the OS4 video drivers, we will have accelerated support that doesn't jump from the 9200 to the Radeon HD card skipping 3D support for a huge number of gpus.
Think about it, we have 3D support for the R300, R400, and R500 cards thanks primarily to Mark and Frank.

And other little goodies that might pop up?
That's anyone's guess, BUT they have dropped surprises on us before, and I'm almost certain that they will drop a few more, unannounced, on us before this is over.

And as to X64, yeah that WILL be cool, won't it?
BUT, if we aren't to see a large part of our current user base slowly fade away, it will pay to keep the current OS under development.

After all, as you've pointed out, a great deal of this is going to carry over into NG, or does that become NGNG?

[ Edited by Jim 14.12.2016 - 20:11 ]