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Originally Posted by kolla
Yes, and force you upgrade at gun point, or something.
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Yes, that is effectively what happens.
When the OS was distributed on mask-ROMS inside new computers there was a strong incentive to keep bugs down and the release frequency low. A few machines such as the A1000 and early A3000's had the ability to 'soft-kick', so Commodore distributed beta kickstarts to developers for testing. But both developers and users only had to deal with a small number of release versions which were carefully crafted for backwards compatibility and had well defined differences.
Contrast that with disk-based OS's on other platforms. Linux has so many different versions it's a joke. How are users supposed to deal with it? 'Just' compile your applications from source, or even recompile the kernal! (and pray it still works). If AmigaOS is open-sourced then we may soon be the same boat.
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The version with most bugs and compatibility issues - good choice!
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Also the version with the
least bugs and compatibility issues! When there is only one...
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The point of open sourcing would be for academic reasons mostly, and for freedom for anyone to read code and learn without the risk of "legal prosecution" or being "locked out" from developing for example on AROS.
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AmigaOS API's are well defined so what's the point of examining the source code?
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Have you noticed all the new hardware for Amiga lately? New boards etc? Ever thought it might have had something to do with the leaked 3.1 sources from a couple of years ago? People learnt from them.
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A lot more 3rd party hardware was produced before 3.1 was leaked. How did they manage it without learning from the source code?