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I think it's impossible for Aros to reach a good maturity in the short term with contributors offering their service for free, while Amigaos and Amibench can be "premium" versions of Aros with paid contributors.
Hold my beer.
I think we're mixing up a couple of things here. A system can be free without its development being unpaid, and a paid product doesn't automatically have a well-funded development team behind it.
I agree that none of this happens overnight. But I'm not convinced that AmigaOS or AmiBench can reach that maturity in the short term, even if they were commercial products. Paid development can certainly help; the real question is how much sustained development, testing, and maintenance those projects can actually fund.
The bigger challenge I see right now is fragmentation and where we put our limited effort. We need to make AROS much easier for developers coming from other systems to get into. The goal should be familiar APIs, an accessible SDK, and a toolchain that a new developer can set up and start using in 30 minutes.
This isn't just about bringing more applications over. Some of those developers will inevitably fix missing functionality, improve libraries and tools, and leave behind a stronger foundation for everyone who comes after them. That's the kind of momentum I'd like to see. Something closer to Linux in its early days, where making the system useful to more developers also brought in more people capable of improving the system itself.
There's also the cost of getting started. A developer who is merely curious is much more likely to experiment if they can use hardware they already own (yours truly). If trying a platform requires buying a dedicated machine or a particular commercial package, some potential contributors will simply never take that first step. Making AROS easy to build and run on an existing computer could be a real advantage here.
And AI can help accelerate this process, but it doesn't make the groundwork unnecessary. If anything, it makes clear interfaces and shared building blocks even more important, so that each contribution strengthens the platform instead of becoming yet another isolated workaround.