Hot on the heals of the reveal that RISC OS Developments had acquired Castle Technology and with it the rights to RISC OS 5, more news on the future of RISC OS has emerged this week: RISC OS Developments are working with RISC OS Open to relicense RISC OS under the Apache 2.0 License, a popular and fairly permissive open-source license.
 
Although some the OS's components were already available under permissive open-source licenses such as the BSD and CDDL licenses, ever since RISC OS Open's inception the primary license has been the Castle License, which came in commercial and non-commercial flavours, neither of which satisfied all of the requirements that the OSI deem necessary in order for the code released under that license to be considered "true" open source. So although the "shared source" Castle License was better than nothing and certainly played a big part in RISC OS's survival post-Iyonix, many people have also felt that it's been holding the platform back. ROOL and ROD hope that by relicensing the OS under this new license, developer and user interest in the OS will increase, and the OS will be kept free to grow and evolve into the next decade and beyond.
 
More information about what this means for RISC OS and what ROD's and ROOL's plans for the future of RISC OS are will be released at the London Show this weekend.
 

In a previous article, we covered some of the online resources for reading online some of the magazine from past years.
 
Now you can also enjoy the whole of The Frobnicate collection online. There has also been some lively discussion on the magazines online in the ROOL forums.
 
There is also some good content (especially technical articles) from Acorn User.
 
And if you want something right to to date, we should see new editions from Archive and Drag'n'Drop around the London show.
 

This year's London Show is due to take place on Saturday the 27th of October, at the usual location of the St. Giles Hotel in Feltham. The show runs from 11 AM to 5 PM, with tickets being £5 at the door (and under-16's free). Exhibitors this year are set to include:

• 3rd Event Technologies, with the AMCS Music Creation system
• ABUG, aka the Acorn and BBC Micro User Group
• Adrian Lees with Aemulour and Geminus
• Anthony Bartram of AMCOG Games, possibly with a brand new game ready for release
• Archive Magazine, who will be celebrating their 30th birthday
• BBC Media Preservation with Paul Emerton
• Chris Hall, who will be selling his new !FamTree app, as well as showing off his Raspberry Pi powered GPS unit
• CJE Micro's / The Fourth Dimension, who plan to have their band-new Pi-topRO v2 available, along with as many of their existing products as possible
• Drag 'n Drop Magazine
• Nigel WIllmott with Organizer
• R-Comp with many of their products, including the new mini.m (providing they haven't lost it down the back of the sofa)
• Retro Software, including some previews of in-development games
• Andy Marks of RISC OS Bits, who will also be showing off some of Ident Computers's products
• RISC OS Developments Ltd, who may have new information to share during their theatre presentation
• RISC OS Open Ltd, who are likely to have copies of RISC OS 5.24 available, along with progress updates on the bounty system and more
• Neil Fazakerley's Riscy Robots
• The RISC OS User Group Of London
• Matthew and Peter Howkins with the latest version of RPCEmu
• Sine Nomine Software
• Vince Hudd of Soft Rock Software
• Steve Drain with Basalt and other things
• Steve Fryatt with CashBook, PrintPDF and Locate2
• Richard Broadhurst's Tricky Gaming
• RobC's VideoNuLA addon for the BBC Micro
• And last but not least, the charity stand, who will be raising money for Combat Stress

If that's not enough, there's also likely to be a full set of theatre presentations, from presenters including CJE, R-Comp, RISC OS Developments, and RISC OS Open.
 
Be sure to visit the show's website for up-to-the-minute news in the run-up to the show.
 

Some things we noticed this month. What did you see?
 
Orpheus Internet hits crowdfunding target.
 
Elesar offering a free 128GB SSD drive promotion with a new Titanium bought before 8th October.
 
Some packaging confessions and advice on running RISCOS OS directly on Linux The RISC OS Blog.
 
A video of ARM's 1992 presentation to Apple about the ARM610 - YouTube / Centre for Computing History
 
Reminder there is a show next month....
 

Over the summer, ROOL quietly slipped out another update to their DDE toolset. We saw an update in April and the July release of DDEc is another incremental release.
 
There are some changes to !C++ and !CC applications and existing users can update just by copying the existing files onto the existing release. New copies on the ROOL store are using the latest release.
 
While there is no real features, it is really important to see such a critical tool being maintained and updated.
 
ROOL also mention in their release email the bounty to add ARMv7 inline assembler to the C Compiler. If you are interested in contributing to this bounty, details are here.
 

For this first article looking at how to create PackMan/RiscPkg packages, I've decided to use my SunEd program as a guinea pig. Being a simple C application with no dependencies on other packages, it'll be one of the most straightforward things on my site to get working, and one of the easiest for other people to understand.
 
Read on to discover how to turn simple apps like SunEd into RiscPkg packages, and more importantly, how to automate the process.
 
 

In July, Orpheus announced their plan to crowdfund their new project.
 
With their usual modesty, they quietly recently updated their website to say the Company had raised the target figure and work has begun. Excellent news for RISC OS market and for their customers.....
 
On a personal note, my 6 year old router had issues over the weekend. Richard Brown from Orpheus was on the phone sorting it out at 9am on Saturday morning and helping me to sort out a replacement router asap.....
 
Orpheus Internet website
 

This time, it is our pleasure to interview Jeroen Vermeulen, who has just released a RISC OS remake of the old BBC Micro game Dickie Brickie, which is now free on !Store.
 
Would you like to introduce yourself?
My name is Jeroen Vermeulen and I’m from The Netherlands. Recently I’ve remade the BBC Micro game Dickie Brickie for RISC OS which is available from the PlingStore.
 
How long have you been using RISC OS?
I’ve used RISC OS way back in the past and only quite recently came back to it. My experience with RISC OS started when I bought a Acorn A3000 in mid 1990. It was followed up with an A4000 which I used until around 1998. I then left the RISC OS scene. Shortly after the Raspberry Pi was introduced and RISC OS was available for it I started to play around with it again. Nothing too serious until mid last year when I decided to pick up programming again and do programming on RISC OS as well. Before I owned an A3000, me and my brother owned a BBC Micro from around 1985.
 
What other systems do you use?
Windows 10 PC/laptop, Apple iPad.
 
What is your current RISC OS setup?
RPI 2B with Pi Zero Desktop and SSD. Next to that I use emulators on Windows 10 like RPCEMU, Arculator, VA5000.
 
What do you think of the retro scene?
I very much love the RISCOS as well as the BBC Micro retro scene. For RISC OS for example I find it amazing what Jon Abbott has been doing with ADFFS. For the BBC Micro I’m finally able to collect programs I once only could read about and have a play with it. Some of the new software that appears for the BBC Micro is extraordinary and I find it very interesting to follow the stardot.org.uk forums with people like kieranhj, tricky, sarahwalker, robc to name but a few doing some wonderful things with the machine and making it work under emulation as well.
 
Do you attend any of the shows and what do you think of them?
No (not yet), but I follow the show reports via sites like Iconbar and Riscository. When available I even watch some of the show’s videos. I like it the reports/videos are online and they do give some valuable extra/background information if you’ve not been there. As well as put some faces with the names you otherwise only read about 😊
 
What do you use RISC OS for in 2018 and what do you like most about it?
Programming. I very much like the fact that e.g. AMCOG and Drag’nDrop programs are available and sources are “open” and thus can be studied to learn from. This and the AMCOG Dev Kit allows you to do things that normally would cost more time othwerwise. It’s is the reason why I decided to distribute the sources with the Dickie Brickie game as well, just in case…
 
Retro kind of things like running games and other programs. On my PC I have an application called LaunchBox which allows RISC OS and BBC Micro programs to be run with a click of a button under emulation. Software/Games that once I could only read about in the Acorn magazines of the time I’m now able to run. For some reason especially with the BBC Micro it was hard to get any software where we lived and we had to make do with programming some of it ourselves or get it by typing in from magazine listings. The latter leading me many years later to remake Dickie Brickie. Back in the day it was a lot of work to type it in, but when we ran it we finally got a glimpse what the machine was capable of with the sprites, sound and animations on display.
 
What is your favourite feature/killer program in RISC OS?
StrongED & StrongHelp, BBC Basic, Netsurf, ADFFS, ArcEm, BeebIt, InfoZip, AMCOG Dev Kit
 
What would you most like to see in RISC OS in the future?
Just ongoing developments in general like RISC OS Open is doing with some of the foundations of the system.
 
Favourite (vaguely RISC OS-releated) moan?
Things can always be better of course, but sometimes I’m just amazed that RISC OS is still around and actively used and developed for. For what I want to do with RISC OS currently – mainly programming – and the fact that I’m still (re-)discovering/learning things I don’t have any complaints
 
Can you tell us about what you are working on in the RISC OS market at the moment?
I have been working on a remake of a bbc micro game Dickie Brickie. I started remaking it using my own code, but when I learned about the AMCOG Dev Kit I switched over and rewrote most of the game. There is a really nice article on the game at the Riscository site.
 
Any surprises you can't or dates to tease us with?
I’m investigating a next game to program. I quite like the idea of making a platform game, but I’ve some learning to do on how to do that so it could be a while.
 
Apart from iconbar (obviously) what are your favourite websites?
Riscository, RISC OS Open (Forums), RISCOS Blog, DragDrop, Stardot (Forums) and some recently discovered websites on programming and game development.
 
What are your interests beyond RISC OS?
Programming and IT in general.
 
If someone hired you for a month to develop RISC OS software, what would you create?
That’s a tough question… perhaps some updates to Paint.
 
Any future plans or ideas you can share with us?
I would like to investigate the use of the DDE and C language.
 
What would you most like Father Christmas to bring you as a present?
Nothing very special comes to mind. But it would be nice if JASPP would be allowed to disctribute some more games and/or games from the past (e.g. 4th Dimension) would be more easily available.
 
Any questions we forgot to ask you?
No. Thank you very much for the interview!