collaboration [2]

Although dated a few days ago, today saw the publication of a Joint Press Release from RISCOS Ltd. [3] and RISC OS Open Ltd. [4] on the Comp.Sys.Acorn.Announce usenet group.  This press release talks about co-operaton between the two companies and sounds positive for the future of RISC OS [5] development.

Setting the scene at the beginning of the press release, we are told that back in the Acorn days, there had been two strands of the operating system for the different markets that Acorn were pursuing. 

The description clarifies the ancestry of the Castle [6] Strand as being the Set Top Box strand from Acorn and the RISCOS Ltd. [7] Strand as being used in a number of different products.

Interestingly, source code to both strands are available to developers but under different agreements.

From what I've understood of the press release (see below), the important things about it are the facts that RISCOS Ltd. and RISC OS [8] Open Ltd. will be co-operating in some really key areas - those of Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) and Version Numbering. 

With two strands out there and development of each progressing at a different pace (no puns please), it would be easy for one strand to release several features of a component under one version number whilst the other strand releases several versions with smaller feature increments. 

Agreement on version numbers is critical to avoiding problems for developers wanting to make use of such features. The agreement is between RISCOS Ltd and RISC OS Open Ltd. (Castle have stepped back from Desktop development - with RISC OS Open Ltd. managing the release of the Set Top Box and Iyonix strand of the operating system).  This appears to make perfect sense; although it seems to be a small step, it is one which is likely to result in positive gains for end users.  With a workable agreement there should be no need for inter-platform wars on the newsgroups and a co-operative atmosphere there may actually welcome new users.

Press Release below:

RISCOS Ltd / RISC OS Open Ltd Joint Press Release     date 23rd Nov 2007

Right back to the days of Acorn, there have been two distinct strands of RISC OS development. These two strands were developed to exploit different markets and hardware platforms. The Castle Technology strand is used in a number of products, including the IYONIX PC and various set top boxes. The RISCOS Ltd strand is also used in a number of different products, including the A9Home [9], the VirtualAcorn range of software emulators and as upgrades to existing Acorn computers via the RISC OS Select scheme. Sources to both strands are available free of charge to developers. One strand is gradually being published under the Castle Technology Shared Source initiative by RISC OS Open Ltd. The RISCOS Ltd strand is available to Registered Developers and Hardware Manufacturers under NDA or as part of the Authorised Manufacturer Scheme, for both commercial and non-commercial exploitation. Today, RISC OS Open (ROOL) and RISCOS Ltd (ROL) are pleased to announce an agreement to enable co-operation in the development of these two strands of RISC OS.

It is envisaged that this will be a two-step process:

Step One: to jointly co-ordinate future developments in order to avoid work being carried out on one strand of RISC OS which is incompatible with work on the other. For example, ensuring that when new features are added, they are implemented in a way which can interact as smoothly as possible with those features where they already exist on the other strand. This will broadly be achieved through the publishing and maintenance of public API documentation and guiding developers to that documentation.

Step Two: to investigate ways to improve the current situation for developers of software. It is hoped that RISC OS Open and RISCOS Ltd can implement solutions to problems which developers are currently faced with, for example the existing situation with software version numbers being divergent on the two different RISC OS strands. RISC OS Open and RISCOS Ltd are committed to ensuring that RISC OS users and developers will see real benefits from this co-operation over the coming months and into the years ahead.