> Perhaps they ought to consider asking all current contributors to sign a contract
> that covers the rights to that code.

The problem of this idea would be to determine the other contracting party. The MorphOS team is not a legal entity, so who would such contract be concluded with? Of course, any team member could simply contribute his code under a custom license that grants the usage of the code within all (or certain) future MorphOS releases. The question is if all current MorphOS team members even want to grant such license. Tokai certainly didn't. And I'm not sure the MorphOS team is in a position to demand this from its members and expel contributors who wouldn't want to comply.

>> 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.

No, we wouldn't. As I said, compiling for x64 is no problem for the majority of the code. Majority of code doesn't equal majority of effort in terms of ISA transition. The hard part is creating the small layer (relatively speaking in terms of code quantity) that the recompilable majority of the OS runs on top of (i.e. kernel and kernel-mode drivers). Or put another way: How to show a proof of concept demo of MorphOS user space code on x64 without x64-compatible OS kernel?

>> 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.

Frank's contribution has primarily been graphics (and audio) drivers I think, the code of which should be compilable for another ISA (he may correct me on this if assumed wrongly). The PPC-specific low-level code (Quark kernel etc.) was laire's work.

> 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?

Yes, unless there are more current team members than publicly known, among them one or more developers especially "hired" for the x64 transition. But how likely is this?

>>> I'm sure there are other developers with their own current projects.
>>> MOST of them, no doubt PPC oriented.

>> This I doubt. I'm sure most work done on MorphOS is not oriented to any
>> ISA but written in portable, endian-agnostic C code, thus easily compilable
>> for whatever ISA (including x64).

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

I replied to (and doubt) your claim that most work that is currently being done for MorphOS is PPC-oriented. I assume that a good share of bigfoot's current MorphOS projects is not PPC-oriented, or oriented to any specific ISA at all. Or do you really believe that most MorphOS components are written in PPC ASM?

> I would SO like to jettison all my reliance on that piece of dung.

What "piece of dung"? (Sorry, I seem to have lost track.)