A recent news release announced that RISC OS Open Ltd is working with RISC OS Developments, following their recent acquisition of the RISC OS intellectual property through the purchase of Castle Technology Ltd, in their mission to reinvigorate the RISC OS market.
RISC OS was first released in 1987 by iconic British computer company Acorn Computers and was created by the same team who designed the original Arm microprocessor. The operating system was a proprietary, closed-source product, sometimes licensed to third parties for use in projects as diverse as digital TV decoders, factory automation systems.
In the early 2000’s, RISC OS was acquired by Castle Technology and subsequently developed for their range of desktop systems. Then in 2006, Castle worked with RISC OS Open to release the source code to RISC OS under a partly-free license. This move allowed anyone to contribute to the RISC OS source code and use it non-commercially free of charge. Commercial users of RISC OS were still required to pay royalties to Castle.
Now, Castle Technology is a wholly-owned subsidiary of RISC OS Developments and RISC OS is being made available under a true Free Open Source Software license. RISC OS can run on various devices including Raspberry Pi.
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