RISC OS Open at 20: How a Proprietary OS Became Apache-Licensed and Community-Run

Founded in June 2006, RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL) set out to pry open a proprietary operating system and hand it to anyone willing to contribute. Two decades later that gamble has mostly paid off: the platform is healthier than the one ROOL inherited, sustained by a community that files bugs, funds bounties, and tests nightly builds. Early milestones came fast — the first public source releases by 2007, automated nightly autobuilds by 2010, and a donation-driven Bounty Scheme that still steers the roadmap today.

The turning points were hardware and licensing. Porting RISC OS to the Raspberry Pi in 2012 put the OS in front of a new generation and briefly broke ROOL’s web traffic records, while a run of stable ROM releases (5.20 through 5.30) expanded support across everything from vintage Risc PCs to seven modern hardware platforms. The long-sought goal arrived in 2018, when RISC OS was re-licensed under Apache 2.0 — legally free to use, modify, and sell for the first time ever. The following year the entire codebase, including roughly 106,000 commits of history, moved to a public GitLab, and accepted merge requests have since passed the thousand mark.

Looking ahead, ROOL’s focus is the Moonshots initiative: a shift to full-time, multi-year engineering aimed at moving RISC OS to 64-bit Arm before aging 32-bit chips disappear. Recent wins include freeing the full 8GB of a Raspberry Pi from 32-bit memory limits and the unexpected return of Fortran to the toolchain after an old copy resurfaced on a decades-old backup tape. It’s a case study in how a niche legacy platform can be revived through open licensing and volunteer momentum rather than left to decay.