RISC OS is a great OS of its own. Unfortunately there are those that think moving forward means going more like a much older line of OS's. RISC OS is more modern than, and in many ways much better as a desktop OS than what some now want to copy into RISC OS at the potential to damage what is good about RISC OS. The system they think is good to add more and more features from into RISC OS is that of the Unix Like Operating Systems. And these people focus on one of the older lines of Unix that is still around as there source of inspiration, being BSD.

It began with innocent things like the UnixLib alternative to the SharedCLib, this still seems ok as it is just a language specific shared library implementation in a RISC OS native way. Then more and more things that simply are not RISC OS began to creep in, things that are clearly Unix (even where more modern methods for the same exist), such as Dynamic Linked Shared Libraries (more modern can be seen in Amiga OS Shared Libraries, no dynamic linking needed). These people are looking towards BSD for a way to change long established RISC OS API's that have no need of changing at the API level. All the advantages they are promoting can easily be gained by RISC OS native means, and without creating a new API for the most part (though for a couple things some extension of the existing API may be needed).

I really like RISC OS, and like the fact that it is still maintained and open source. That said I do not want to loose what makes RISC OS what it is.

There are also those changing details of the User Interface in some programs to be more like Macintosh System Software and those that copied Macintosh System Software (like the castrated means of copy/cut and paste, castrated compared to the normal RISC OS method). Why are people looking to destroy what makes the OS good to begin with? Not to mention that doing things like this make for a less consistent User Experience, as the mass majority of applications still do it the normal RISC OS way, and most will never be changed to the castrated way.

Put simply there are those that are attempting to migrate RISC OS, its API, and its UI to much older styles because those are what other systems use for the same things, and attempting to say it is to make RISC OS more modern. I apologize though I can not see how going to something much older than the ARM CPU can be called making the OS more modern, when the ideas in RISC OS are much more modern in nature than the old ones they wish to integrate.

The only potential advantage of there move is better support for modern HW (because the older style systems have said support in there current forms) and protocols. The thing is it would really not take any more work to add this support in a RISC OS native way. And as to the UI changes there are zero advantages to going backwards in time there.

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