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Originally Posted by kolla
consider all the patches and unofficial updates people need to use to make even plain OS3.1 work on just about any Amiga hardware.
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Considering... it's been a long time since I had KS3.1 on an A3000, A600 and CD32, but I don't remember having to do 'all the patches and unofficial updates' you say people need to make even plain OS3.1 work. I just used the stock OS 3.1 system disks and everything worked fine. I even put the KS2.1 ROM back in my A600 and it mostly worked fine though it still had WB3.1 on the hard drive.
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To find out how it treats hardware, for example.
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The one time I 'needed' to do that I just disassembled the relevant part of the ROM. But that only told me what the hardware was
expected to do, ie. no more than I already knew from the Autodocs etc. I bet the source code wouldn't have have provided any more insight.
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When CBM was alive, there was CATS and there were developers to consults with, they provided all the help hardware manufacturers needed, including source code if necessary.
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I remember CATS, but I was only a software developer so perhaps I wasn't in on it. However I don't remember Commodore offering the full OS source to anyone who asked - and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't hand over
any of it without an ironclad NDA. Which is the way it should be. Developers should be able to get all the information they need from officially published documentation
without having to trawl through the source code!
The
real reason people want AmigaOS open-sourced is obvious - they want to hack it to do what they want rather than go to the effort of developing code which works with the stock OS. And we all know what the result will be - dozens of customized OS versions each with its own peculiarities, and lots of frustrated users having to constantly change their OS just to run other people's stuff. It's bad enough now with what seems like 90% of new Aminet uploads not working on stock machines...