Développement de MorphOS
From MorphOS Library
Dans la première phase de son histoire, "MorphOS" n'était qu'un rêve qui lentement est devenu réalité grâce à de jeunes programmeurs talentueux. Puis, le développement de la machine par "bPlan" arrivant à son terme, "MorphOS" devint le seul OS distribué avec la distribution initiale des 200 premières machines (estampillées betatesteurs) par "Genesi" , le développement était alors bien soutenu, voir accéléré. Une fois que le financement des entreprises a pris fin, en 2002/03, le développement de "MorphOS" a de nouveau ralenti. Aujourd'hui, le développement actuel se poursuit lentement mais constamment avec un certain nombre d'activités simultanées.
(1) Le noyau interne (le fichier boot.img) est géré exclusivement par l'équipe de développement de MorphOS. On en sait peu sur les améliorations en cours, mais il est de notoriété publique que les membres de l'équipe de développement de MorphOS utilisent déjà MorphOS sur eMac et PowerBook G4 d'Apple.
(2) Other parts of MorphOS which reside outside the boot.img are sometimes updated and released independently from the official OS updates. For instance, this concerns MUI and Ambient. Furthermore, after releasing MorphOS 2.2, the Development Team published an update pack with various minor improvements, especially several libraries, for those who are still using the free version 1.4.5 of the OS to stay compatible with new software releases.
(3) Development for MorphOS in the open source/third party arena is not only active but well appreciated. Besides the already mentioned Ambient desktop, an original MorphOS product that became an open source effort later, there are several open source applications and games from other platforms ported over to MorphOS.
(4) In an interesting move to focus third party developers' attention and following initiatives already attempted in other environments, users have got together to provide a "bounty" system where users (and coders) can submit ideas for development and contribute money for their realisation. Several noticeable projects have emerged from this "bounty" system, including SFSDoctor and MorphUp (a sophisticated package manager for automatic installation and upgrade of applications). The bounty system is being used even to speed up the development of parts of the OS that have a particular value for users. An example of a current project being developed and supported by the bounty program is a wrapper that translates GUI toolkit functions from GTK into MUI ones to facilitate ports of software making use of that user interface and to integrate them also with regard to their appearance.