[Edit: sorry to have taken so long in publishing this since the italian version: been busy in my job and in real life.]
I would have liked to start this thread with some mythological tone, such as Conan the barbarian and similars, talking about heirs to the throne, heritages, traditions and other stuff like that: i sincerely admit i was tempted to do so.
It is nonetheless that the sourceforge page of what has announced this week from Damocles as Anubis OS, the latest incarnation inspired by Amiga OS, based on a Linux kernel and with a Graphic subsystem that, according to the Anubis mailing list, should be based on xcb,xlib and a mix of Glib/Gtk and Zune. Further details have been explained here.
In short, is their intention to do with Amiga OS what has been done from Apple in OS X: somebody already uised the term "carbonize".
From what both Michal and m0ns00n (Hogne Titlestad) told me, the main reason that make them start the project has been an essential steadfastness from other AROS developers towards more innovative goals: Damocles already complained about the conservative approach of many of the core developers. as i wrote here.
So, Michal, together with m0ns00n and Damocles started to define the base functionalities and requirements of Arix. Michal will begin tu put full steam on it once the Efika port will be done; task that is bringing along the comppletion of the USB mass-storage bounty, another important requirement.
In a following IRC chat session, Michal told me how Amiga OS seems to have an history of lost opportunities, both for management and markerting mistakes, but also for ego trips and "balcanization" of the resources. He thinks at ARIX (sorry i dont like the name Anubis OS too much) as the Amiga OS that should have been, with resource tracking, protected memory and all those features that first Amiga OS then AROS were unable/unwilling to develop for the known reasons.
Michal is a pragmatic person and for him the usual debate about whether if you use a POSIX kernel in an Amiga OS that ceases to be an Amiga OS is or not is over: he decided that it is and, i hope, wil prove it quite good in the future.
Anyway, has to be known that Anubis OS cannot be considered an AROS fork: technically AFAIK a fork happens when a project is duplicated and modified but, being Anubis based in a different kernel, figures as an indipendent project.
The announcement was taken not too good from the amiga boards: for the aforementioned reasons above and for the cronical lack of development that is afflicting all incarnations of Amiga OSes, a heavy FUD cloud spreaded around, like has rarely been seen before. The maini nconcern among other amiga users is the runaway of the already few developers towards a system that might not even reach an usable state, and the progressive death of the already existing systems.
Luckilly, open source projects hardly die: they might become unmantained until somebody else starts again to take care of it or integrates the code in their own project; luckilly for AROS this fate looks far from happening: the project look active as ever so far, and hoping this state will last.
And, like to show that AROS, despite the imminent departure of "Doctor" Schulz and the announced "pregnancy" (kitty is a female cat :P) is still vital, let's talk about the so-far spiritual heeir of the Doctor: Stanislaw Sszymczyk that, according to its job for the self-compilation bounty, now almost [edit: no more almost: done!!!] finished has achieved considerable result, such as:
Beside that, sszy also standardised the development packages in the variuous port of AROS under GCC 4.2.2 and included their compilation in the AROS build system in order to have a system of compilers and cross-compilers built for all targets.
Furthermore, Stanislaw gave a look to the sources of Netsurf and OWB; beside some minor issues, the browser can be ported quite easily starting from the OS4 port if the GUI was not a ReAction one; so Stanislaw is looking for someone (looks like o1i might help, and i want to mention ShinkurO due to its experience on workarounds for the zune bugs) to help hm in doing a zune GUI for it.
The OWB port looks a bit more complicated due to the fact that the Gladelib port is required under AROS and so far sszy was unable to do the port.
Another important update comes from the API completion report: Krzysztof Smiechowicz completed its review job that kept him busy since last april; according to its data the completion level of AROS is around 80%. This report is also the ground for a concrete roadmap to follow so that a version 1.0 of AROS will be available in a more human timelapse.
And is also a good step that finally in the mailing list somebody is starting to talk about the strong need for documentation. Krisztof Smiechowicz has already started in adding documentation on the ABI v1 here and hopefully some more important documentations will continue to come soon.
At last look also that somebody will finally take care of the printer.device in a laid back timing; about me i was looking and sent cdocumentation to the guy interrested to help himin the development, included the old Ghostscript port on AROS now no longer working [edit: seems a new port is on the way]; lets hope to see something soon.