MorphOS Development

In the first phase of its history, MorphOS was a dream that slowly came true by means of a number of very talented programmers. Then, when the hardware development by bPlan became closer and closer to finalisation, and MorphOS was the unique OS used for the first distribution of 200 betatester units by Genesi, the development was well supported and accelerated. Once corporate funding ended in 2002/03, MorphOS development slowed down again. Today, the current spare-time development of MorphOS goes on slowly but constantly with a number of simultaneous activities.

(1) The core internals of the boot.img are handled exclusively by the MorphOS Development Team. Little is known about the ongoing improvements, but it is publicly known that the members of the MorphOS Development Team already use MorphOS on Apple's eMac and PowerBook G4.

(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.