RISC OS Open Celebrates 20 Years of Opening Up a Proprietary OS
Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
On June 20, 2006, RISC OS Open Ltd was incorporated with the ambitious goal of open-sourcing the proprietary RISC OS operating system. Twenty years later, the project has largely succeeded, with RISC OS now under Apache 2.0, running on modern hardware like the Raspberry Pi, and supported by a vibrant community. This retrospective highlights key milestones from each year, from the first public source release to the recent Moonshots initiative for 64-bit Arm support.
None of this was the work of ROOL alone. RISC OS today is hugely improved from the sorry state it was in back in 2006, and the scene around it is far livelier for everyone who turned up and got stuck in.
- nickcw
I used and developed software for RISC OS for many years and it was there I cut my teeth as an open source developer.
I wrote the very popular !Director application which let you customize your Desktop and add lots of nifty shortcuts. It could be expanded with BASIC plugins to do just about anything! It was distributed by the Arcade BBS to start with then Acorn User magazine put it on the floppy disk that came with the magazine.
Amazingly Director was written entirely in ARM assembler (with the help of lots of macros). I used to really enjoy writing ARM assembler and used to grit my teeth whenever I had to read the assembly output of the C compiler! I remember writing quicksort in ARM assembler as part of this (to sort menu entries) which was a lot of fun.
I still have a RiscPC under my desk, but I don't think I've turned it on for nearly 15 years :-(
- fidotron
As someone that grew up using Acorn Archimedes it's hard to express to those that were never involved just how difficult what has been going on here is or how surprising it is they have stuck at it. The overwhelming majority of us had left long before 2000 (even before 1995 really), and it's not as if there were ever that many compared to the Amiga or ST universes.
- Lio
I think maybe the famous surviving Risc OS application might be Sibelius music notation program.
It’s owned by Avid now but it started as the work of two brothers on an Acorn Archimedes under Risc OS.
- forinti
It's impressive how fast it boots up on a Pi. I've tried all the OSs for the Pi and RISCOS is way faster than all the alternatives.
- amiga386
If you want to know what it's like to program for RISC OS: