RISC OS Open Ltd. (also referred to as ROOL) is a

limited company In a limited company, the liability of members or subscribers of the company is limited to what they have invested or guaranteed to the company. Limited companies may be limited by Share (finance), shares or by guarantee. In a company limited by ...

engaged in

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

and

IT consulting In management, information technology consulting (also called IT consulting, computer consultancy, business and technology services, computing consultancy, technology consulting, and IT advisory) is a field of activity which focuses on advising or ...

. It is managing the process of publishing the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

RISC OS RISC OS is a computer operating system originally designed by Acorn Computers Ltd in Cambridge, England. First released in 1987, it was designed to run on the ARM chipset, which Acorn had designed concurrently for use in its new line of Archim ...

. Company founders include staff who formerly worked for

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, the company which acquired RISC OS after Acorn's demise. The source code publication was initially facilitated by a shared source initiative (SSI) between ROOL and

Castle Technology Castle Technology Limited, named after Framlingham Castle, was a British computer company based in Cambridge, England. It began as a producer of ARM computers and manufactured the Acorn-branded range of desktop computers that run RISC OS. Fo ...

(CTL), prior to a switch to the more widely recognised Apache licence in October 2018. ROOL hopes that by making the RISC OS source code available for free it will help stimulate development of both the RISC OS source code and the platform as a whole.

Operations

ROOL set initial goals to make the source code easily available (on the

web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

), and also to establish a

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

forum Forum or The Forum (plural forums or fora) may refer to: Common uses * Forum (legal), designated space for public expression in the United States *Forum (Roman), open public space within a Roman city **Roman Forum, most famous example *Internet ...

and

bug tracker A bug tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system. Many bug tracking systems, such as those ...

. These have been available since December 2006. Operations exist to facilitate tasks related to ROOL's goals. Additionally, staff undertake development work on the code themselves. Since early 2009, ownership, development and sales of the tools were transferred to RISC OS Open. As an extension to the initial goals, in 2011 ROOL introduced a

bounty Bounty or bounties commonly refers to: * Bounty (reward), an amount of money or other reward offered by an organization for a specific task done with a person or thing Bounty or bounties may also refer to: Geography * Bounty, Saskatchewan, a g ...

scheme to encourage further development. Attendance at

computer show A trade fair, also known as trade show, trade exhibition, or trade exposition, is an exhibition organized so that companies in a specific industry can showcase and demonstrate their latest products and services, meet with industry partners and c ...

s is often arranged, with other knowledgeable coders sometimes standing in when ROOL staff are unavailable. A

Facebook page Facebook is a social-network service website launched on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. The following is a list of software and technology features that can be found on the Facebook website and mobile app and are available to users of ...

was created in 2012.

Publishing

A number of book titles have been published starting in 2015 with the RISC OS Style Guide, a three book set in support of the Desktop Development Environment, BBC BASIC Reference Manual and the RISC OS 5 User Guide.

Forum

Discussions of a technical and more general nature take place on the forum. A thread entitled "Let's get started with a Pandora port" witnessed discussion of

porting In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

to the

Cortex-A8 The ARM Cortex-A8 is a 32-bit processor core licensed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARMv7-A architecture. Compared to the ARM11, the Cortex-A8 is a dual-issue superscalar design, achieving roughly twice the instructions per cycle. The Cort ...

used in the

Pandora In Greek mythology, Pandora (Greek: , derived from , ''pān'', i.e. "all" and , ''dōron'', i.e. "gift", thus "the all-endowed", "all-gifted" or "all-giving") was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus. As Hes ...

handheld game console. The thread was started in September 2008.

References

{{RISC OS RISC OS Software companies of the United Kingdom Companies based in West Sussex Companies established in 2006 Development software companies 2006 establishments in the United Kingdom Software companies established in 2006