The target audience is mostly a subset of former Amiga users, and the occasional person curious about retro-computing who is more focused on the software than hardware side.
Yes, it's a current project - the mailing list is more active than it has been for a long time, though the number of developers active at any given time is probably in the single to low double digits (for a very generous definition of "active" - people sometimes pops up for a single patch and then disappears for years; this is a niche project).
[I wrote most of the scrollback support for the console handler about a decade ago. Haven't done much with it for years.]
To be clear, the legal turmoil in question is over the current ownership of the original Amiga brand and IP, not AROS itself. AROS is published under a license that is not OSI approved but is actually a fork of the MPL with the word "Netscape" changed.
I wondered if the parent comment was actually talking about the Vampire folks distributing an AmigaOS image with programs/games pre-loaded, without having the rights to do so?
The ApolloOS distribution of AROS that Apollo ship still has plenty of proprietary software on it. In the Discord they’ve discussed that the problem they had with CoffinOS/Amiga Coffin was the rights to Amiga OS.
One big difference is AROS only aims for essentially source compatibility with Amiga, while both ReactOS and Haiku aim for binary compatibility[0].
I've only toyed around a little bit with AROS back when I was a teen, but my impression is it's something a bit different than just a clone of any Amiga OS. It's sort of Amiga-like, but does things differently, and targets very different hardware. Which I think is pretty cool :)
[0] I believe Haiku intends to drop binary compat with BeOS at some point, maybe they already have? It's why Haiku still uses (used?) a version of GCC from 2003, for binary compat
I think the M68k version does aim for binary compatibility where practical, but outside of M68k it doesn't really make much sense as AmigaOS4 on PPC deviates quite significantly from older AmigaOS, and for the other architectures there of course isn't any AmigaOS software.
There are a bunch of hardware clones (usually need genuine custom chips). I think there are a500 and 1200 replacement mother boards (and cases!). There is a replacement a1000 motherboard (just announced) and a Mini-ITX Amiga MB.
There are of course a bunch of FPGA options including the Vampire v4sa which I would pick up, but is a bit on the costly side (~800CAD)
If I were to get an m68k-ish machine to play with today, it'd almost certainly be a Vampire V4 Standalone. It's of course not acceptable to those who insists on classic hardware, but it feels like a close-enough evolution with sufficiently fun improvements.
There are two builds of Haiku right now, one using the legacy compiler for binary compatibility and a new one that updates the compiler at the cost of binary compatibility.
It’s a toy for developers who are building it. No real target audience, other than maybe some extreme Amiga geeks, who will launch it once every few months.
True, but it has been ported to other platforms, including ARM, which makes it interesting as graphical OS for embedded systems. I mean control panels showing data, graphs etc. rather than desktop applications.
To me it would make sense to experiment with AROS on small boards where a full fledged Linux GUI would require too much beer to be usable, or simply to get the most performance from the available CPU/RAM/storage.
It could be cool toy for cases like that, but you need to do a lot of work yourself to get it to behave like embedded system, build custom ui, etc, aka, toy for developers.
It’s very dangerous to be used for real production. It’s AmigaOS at the core, which means that it’s fairly complex (compared to other embedded systems) and at the same time, comes with literally 0 security (shared address space for everyone for a start, before you go anywhere deeper with what’s wrong with security). While it may not be a biggest concern for non internet connected devices, it makes it inherently unstable system (there are embedded systems without memory protection, but they’re much simpler).
Don’t get me wrong, I love playing with toys like that (was involved in a broader Amiga community for a long long time), but for modern times, it’s just a toy.
you can build openssl on AROS: there is a port on Aminet of OpenSSL 1.1.1i that _will_ build (the maintainers only build for AmigaOS 3/m68k and AmigaOS 4/PPC but it'll work on MorphOS and AROS too), and of course aminet is available over HTTP which is how we avoid the bootstrap problem :).
Aside: pretty much anything that will build on a BSD will build on an Amiga/AROS with ixemul.library, but some people think that's cheating.
I think it's a jab at how AROS's site doesn't offer HTTPS. Personally I don't understand why some people are so bothered by this, but I guess conversely it's really easy to add letsencrypt to about anything nowadays...
Two obvious points where leaving it unencrypted is a problem: 1. downloads - which is mostly mitigated by not actually having software downloads on their own site, although of course now the links are subvertable, and 2. they have a paypal donation form on http://www.aros.org/download.php - I assume that clicking into that sends you to the real paypal page, so at least they're not sending credit card details in the clear, but again leaves them open to a nice little tweak to change where the money goes.
EDIT: is this a current project? References to running in a VM on Mac OS 9 with Virtual PC seem awfully dated.