Such an amazing contrast between the Amiga and the Atari ST community.
In the Amiga community, which is larger and more fanatical in general, it seems like people figure they're going to get rich or famous. So there's a bunch of balkanized not-profitable companies creating bizarre ventures and trying to claim the Amiga name or lineage. And so here we have a company owning the OS assets and trying to sell them 20 years later.
The Atari ST by contrast has a completely open source operating system stack now in EmuTOS. While it's not directly from the original Atari sources it is based on the GPL'd sources of the original GEM/GEMDOS from Digital Research and then modified until it is super compatible with the original OS. On top of that there is MiNT, a Unix-like multitasking OS extension, open source since its creation in the late 80s. And open source desktops, task managers, terminals, etc. And the Firebee, new hardware which implements the Atari ST/TT platform over the Freescale Coldfire, and while the hardware is expensive the design is open and the VHDL etc in it is open source. Oh, and there's open source VHDL implementations of the whole original Atari ST design.
It looks somewhat similar, though I don't get the impression that AROS is aiming to be a 100% compatible native OS like EmuTOS is? It looks like AROS has aimed to be a kind of next-generation Amiga OS for new hardware platforms?
AROS is a bit of both. It runs native on a bunch of hardware, including x86, PPC, ARM. It also runs "hosted" on several OSs, with Linux the most common, where it takes advantage of the host OS filesystem and drivers. But it can also run, for some values of run, on real Amiga hardware. With the caveat that it's a bit heavier than original AmigaOS.
It has a lot of additional features, but also lacks some parts of the original still.
In the Amiga community, which is larger and more fanatical in general, it seems like people figure they're going to get rich or famous. So there's a bunch of balkanized not-profitable companies creating bizarre ventures and trying to claim the Amiga name or lineage. And so here we have a company owning the OS assets and trying to sell them 20 years later.
The Atari ST by contrast has a completely open source operating system stack now in EmuTOS. While it's not directly from the original Atari sources it is based on the GPL'd sources of the original GEM/GEMDOS from Digital Research and then modified until it is super compatible with the original OS. On top of that there is MiNT, a Unix-like multitasking OS extension, open source since its creation in the late 80s. And open source desktops, task managers, terminals, etc. And the Firebee, new hardware which implements the Atari ST/TT platform over the Freescale Coldfire, and while the hardware is expensive the design is open and the VHDL etc in it is open source. Oh, and there's open source VHDL implementations of the whole original Atari ST design.