PRESS RELEASE 27/11/07
RISCOS Ltd / RISC OS Open Ltd Joint Press Release
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, 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.
For further details contact:-
info@riscosopen.org
developer@riscos.com