I think the topic is quite right.
I stoped to like the idea of Power2People many years ago. I put a lot of money there, most projects where never taken, or often never completed. I much more like to find a developer and collect
money asked to do a project. This worked a lot of times with good results.
I followed and been involved in AROS the last 14 years.
Activity been up and down. What I can say is that last 3 years been real bad.
Almost everyone left.
Why is that?
First of all tech. move to fast. There was a time that NG Amiga could keep
up with modern computing but that time is over.
Bad organization is also one reason. AROS did not have any clear leader.
In that way most worked on whatever they liked. In an open source world
that is often the case anyway.
Some got angry since they did not have the same idea about what AROS should be and left.
AROS is quite complete regarding the main goal. It is not that much bugs or
missing features.
Why did AROS never attract more users?
Lack of drivers.
Lack of native or good software.
Lack of 64-bit distribution, software.
Lack of the Amiga name.
Lack of legacy 68k Amiga support.
Most that develop for AROS does that on a machine where they can run
AROS hosted or in a VM-player. Even most users run AROS that way.
All the reasons for that is partly explained already. Problem now is
that the machine they use is 64-bit.
Where are we now?
As most of you know Michael Schulz is working on the ARM port. That project is very interesting since that platform is cheap regarding hardware and there is room for another open source OS.
With AmigaOS 68k getting old there is room for AROS 68k.
AROS must focus on 64-bit so that version can work as good as the abi v.0 32-bit version.
It is not that far away from it. As I understand there are problems with the native development
suite.
I'm quite sure that if AROS could run 68k software, games in a way that would seam almost seamless it would be interesting to a lot of people.
It would be a bridge between legacy and a more powerful computer.
Forget about a system where you can do everything. Don't ask for office for AROS or pro. music or 3D software. It is just stupid to use on a platform that don't have memory protection. Forget about a secure system.
AROS can succeed as a gaming, video, emulation, demo platform with a focus on retro stuff.
I see no reason why we could not have a youtube player but downloading stuff on AROS can be quite dangerous. It should be restricted like it is on lets say other gaming platforms like PS4. Web-browsing can be done from almost anywhere these days. I don't see why it would be so important to have on AROS. It is kind of crazy I'm saying this since the lack of a mothern web-browser is why I sold my Amiga 4000 in the first place. Things change
I have big hopes for AROS for Pi and when it is released I hope the Pi community will embrace it.
It is kind of our only hope. Not only for AROS but for the future of Amiga like platform.
Amiga 68k is quite big but that is not for the future, even if the Vampire project could change that.
I just don't think that is very likely.
If it was up to me I would take lots of the money from Power2People and get o1i to port latest version of WinUAE running on AROS 64-bit and AROS for arm. He already had a version of WinUAE running that was called Janus-UAE2. It needs to be recompiled and there are still lot's to be worked on there.
http://o1i.blogspot.com/I learned through the years that what matters the most is the Amiga 68k classic support.
