History
SkyOS is the result of over ten years of work by Robert Szeleney and volunteers.
A young man at the university, Szeleney and several friends began the "Sky Operating System" as an experiment in OS design. As the years progressed and the other founding members of SkyOS distanced from the project, Szeleney continued work on the operating system in his spare time.
Szeleney's full-time job was in automation programming, and he already had a fair understanding of operating system design. But he continued to use SkyOS as a learning device, releasing four versions under an open source license.
The project reached the height of its popularity in 2004, when Szeleney decided to close the source of SkyOS and begin work on the fifth version. At the beginning of the year, Szeleney started a paid beta program to fund development and distribution of the OS, expecting to have very few (if any) interested subscribers. At the same time, members of the community hosted a contest to determine the look of the GUI, which drew significant attention to the project. So much attention, in fact, that by the end of that same year, the SkyOS community had tripled in size, and Szeleney had hundreds of active beta testers downloading and testing his twice-monthly releases.
SkyOS underwent many changes after this surge in popularity. Because of significant differences at the source level, Szeleney stopped thinking of what was under development as the fifth version of his operating system, and the name "SkyOS 5.0" was rebranded to simply "SkyOS". A more professional demeanor was taken throughout the project, and Szeleney even considered incorporating under the name "Djinnworks". The SkyOS community has since shrunk significantly from its peak in 2004.
As of 1/30/2009, development on SkyOS is currently halted. The developer is deciding on which course of action to take regarding future development:
- Open source SkyOS
- Make SkyOS available for free
- Specialize on a yet-to-be-defined niche
- Stop SkyOS development
There is also an experimental attempt to use NetBSD or Linux to solve the driver issues.
Read more about this topic: SkyOS
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