"Moonshots" Initiative to Secure the Future of RISC OS

Summary

edit "Moonshots" Initiative to Secure the Future of the OS Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 28 Mar 2025 15:36:00 GMT Cambridge, UK – 28-Mar-2025 – RISC OS Open Limited (ROOL) is calling on the global technology community to support a bold new initiative to secure the long-term future of RISC OS. The company today announced the launch of its Moonshots programme – a strategic shift away from incremental development, towards large-scale engineering efforts aimed at modernising the operating system for next-generation Arm architectures. RISC OS, originally developed alongside the first Arm chips in Cambridge, remains a uniquely simple and efficient desktop operating system. It has found renewed interest in recent years thanks to its availability on the Raspberry Pi and its open-source licensing model. However, the platform now faces an existential challenge. “Much of RISC OS is still written in carefully crafted 32-bit assembly language,” explains Steve Revill, Managing Director of ROOL and former Acorn engineer. “With platforms like the Raspberry Pi 5 moving to 64-bit-only processor modes, RISC OS is at risk of being left behind unless we act decisively.” A Step-Change in Scope and Scale Since 2011, ROOL has successfully delivered dozens of community-funded improvements through its bounty scheme. While this model has enabled steady progress, it is not suited to the scale of work now required to modernise RISC OS. The Moonshots initiative represents a fundamental shift: focused, multi-year development projects undertaken by full-time engineers. The first Moonshot aims to make the RISC OS source code portable and compatible with 64-bit Arm platforms, a prerequisite for future hardware support. ROOL has already scoped the work, identified key milestones, and built cost models based on realistic employment and project management needs. Open Source, Open Collaboration All Moonshot deliverables will be open source. ROOL is committed to transparency, regular updates, and involving...