MORPH OPERATING SYSTEM is an Amiga-compatible computer operating system. It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale development boards that use the Genesi firmware including the EFIKA and mobileGT. It is the first operating system that has delivered on its promise to provide a native Amiga-compatible PowerPC operating system.
HISTORY
The project started in 1999, based on the Quark microkernel. The earliest versions of MorphOS ran only via PPC accelerator cards on the Amiga computers, and required portions of AmigaOS to fully function. A collaborative effort between the companies bPlan (of which the lead MorphOS developer is a partner) and Thendic-France in 2002 resulted in the first regular, non-prototype production of bPlan-engineered Pegasos computers capable of running MorphOS or Linux. A busy promotional year followed in 2003, with appearances at conventions and exhibitions in several places around the world, including CES in Las Vegas. Thendic-France had financial problems and folded; however, the collaboration continued under the new banner of "Genesi".
After some bitter disagreements within the MorphOS development team in 2003 and 2004 culminating with accusations by a MorphOS developer that he and others had not been paid, the Ambient desktop interface was released under GPL and is now actively developed by the Ambient development team. Subject to GPL rules, Ambient continues to be included in the commercial MorphOS product. An alternative MorphOS desktop system is Scalos.[5]
On April 1, 2008 the MorphOS team announced that MorphOS 2.0 would be released within Q2/2008. This promise was only kept by a few seconds, with the release of MorphOS 2.0 occurring on June 30, 2008 23:59 CET. MorphOS 2 is commercially available at a price of 150 EUR per