Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12048 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
> I am still unsure what the goal of the community is?
The "community" is far from a homogeneous mass. Everybody has his/her own ideas of what should become of MorphOS in the future. What's important to understand though is that MorphOS is not an open source project. It's closed source so only the
MorphOS team decides what will become of it.
> Have a legacy system to support Amiga apps - is that the main focus?
Kind of. I'd say that the main focus of MorphOS on Power(PC) has been to incorporate as many modern features as possible without breaking the Amiga application compatibility. So far, there has been made no change or improvement that breaks the Amiga application compatibility that was introduced in the very first public MorphOS release 21 years ago.
> Or port it to new, faster machines to go next level
Thing is, either the Amiga compatibility is kept, then even when porting MorphOS to new, faster Power(PC) machines like the Blackbird, MorphOS won't be able to address more than 2 GiB RAM and use more than 1 CPU core (or 1 hardware thread of a CPU core), among other restrictions imposed by the AmigaOS API compatibility (like lack of memory protection, which btw is one reason that MorphOS feels so fast), ...or the Amiga compatibility is abandoned, then everything is possible (64-bit, SMP, memory protection), and porting MorphOS to AMD64/x64/x86-64 makes more sense than keeping it on Power(PC) for obvious reasons.
Plans for a modernized non-PPC MorphOS "NG" were first announced a decade ago. MorphOS on AMD64 was
first shown 2 years ago. No public news since.
> would there be a possible compromise? Maybe two different builds of MorphOS?
That's a reasonable suggestion, but the manpower of the MorphOS team might be lacking for this. They are doing this in their spare time for virtually no payment.
> Another question would be budget & commitment - I strongly assume
> that most (if not all) devs are doing this as a hobby.
Exactly, all of them.