It's not that long that phase5 has announced what will be the choice for the OS of their A\BOX workstation. After the decision to NOT use and support ProDad's new pOS as they do not belive in the way the OS has been done (that is too similar to the AmigaOS, while they want a more updated and powerful able to exploit all the features of their A\BOX) and the fact that ProDAD can invest too much in the upgrading of a complete OS (a thing that requires years of hard work as the BeOS has demonstrated), together with the fact that they cannot (reasonably) put in the hands of third party work the future of their machine, phase5 decided to go and make its own OS.

Yes, another new OS. It's seems that these years there has been a boom in new OS develpment.

phase5, in their announcement, that you can find on their WWW site www.phase5.de, has cleverly introduced the fact that their OS will be very different from that of the Amiga if looked at the way it works at low level. However, from the point of view of the programmer and the user, it will have all the features we are used to, and they will work in a similar way to how they work now on the AmigaOS.
There will also lots of new features that will bring our OS to really compete with the most modern and diffuse OS, and exploiting all the new, original features available on the A\BOX.

The most important thing in a OS is, without doubts, it's kernel, or more simply, what on the Amiga is called Exec (that is, what gives the Amiga it's power, flexibility, multitasking capacity in few hundreds of kilobytes of memory). For this motives, phase5 has chosen to use a "restyled" UNIX kernel for their new OS. This allows the OS to have all the main AmigaOS Exec features (Exec is quite similar to UNIX for its features) but now we can finally enjoy real Memory Protection (UNIX stability is well known) and clever use of Virtual Memory (not as a simple swap file). Moreover we'll keep the use of shared library (a thing almost unknown on UNIX based OS) that keeps the resources needs low.
Moreover, the new OS will have the support for multiprocessing (use of more than a single CPU) and multiuser (a thing only partally avilable on the Amiga with the MultiUserFile system, but not really well intergrated with the OS).

phase5 is planning to produce all the device drivers needed to use all the device we use today plus all the new ones available with te A\BOX like driver for the new expansion ports, or communication boards (Ethernet and ISDN).

Last part of the structure of an OS is its graphics system and the GUI which it uses to interact with the user. phase5 said they are going to work on a system design that mantains all the Amiga major features together with the look and feel. Together with this they ae going to provide the OS with software components simila to all the extra functionality of the Amiga OS like commodities, datatypes, REXX and CLI.

As they already have a functional kernel of AmigaOS 3.1, they are going to support a "Virtual Amiga Machine" on which all the "old" software we are using today will work in a safe envinroment completely embedded into the system.

Together with all this, phase5 plans to include lots of advanced tools for the programmer, making programming a simple and fast task.

The OS will be developed on phase5's PPC cards together with a customized gfx card that has some advanced features of their CAIPIRINHA, allowing the programmer test with the new features of the A\BOX even though they will be reduced in performance (still being competitive with actual PC SVGA cards).

The release date for the alpha and beta version of the OS is for late summer of this year (that is 1997), but will be limited to developers with a PowerUP accelerator (otherwise, where are you going to test the PPC code ? 8) ). The alpha and beta version will be distributed to developers on a CD with possible documentation for a small fee (it's not defined how much though), while free update support will be avilable AT their FTP site.

Last part of their announcement is dedicated to ProDAD and their pOS. As already said, phase5 does not belive in ProDAD capabilities to produce a independant stable OS, with multiprocessing and multitasking capabilities that does not work with AmigaOS, and which is also able to exploit the A\BOX advanced features. phase5 said thay were not able to see ProDAD code work on the PPC, just on the 68K but it was a small demonstration that was too much relating on the already existing and working AmigaOS features.
phase5 declares that they will not prevent, in any way, ProDAD from porting their OS to phase5's hardware, but they are not going to support it. phase5 is, however, ready to welcome ProDAD's pOS once it demonstrates to be a "modern OS that get sufficient support from software developers and that can be ported to the A\BOX in a way that it can make use of the advanced hardware functionalities" of their workstation.

I think this does not need any comment, but just few personal notes.
I belive phase5's attidude against ProDAD's new OS derives from the fact that pOS is still just an expansion of the now quite "old" AmigaOS. This relates on the fact that, for now, Amiga copyrights are not well protected. However none knows what will be the future of those rights, and if the company that will buy them will prevent all the other ones from using it in any way (remember that reverse engineering code to enhace it, it's seriously forbidden). ProDAD's work is, without doubts, based on the enhacement or even rewritting of most of the AmigaOS functions in the hope of keeping as much compatibility as possible (both in binary and source code) with AmigaOS 3.1.
It's not clear then, what are the real possibilities of ProDAD to build a new OS completely independant from the AmigaOS and its copyrights.

For this reasons, together with the fact that pOS is still not developed on the PowerPC that prevents everyone from knowing what are its real potentials, phase5 could not invest on it the future of what can be a revolutionary machine like the A\BOX. We'll see what will be results of the efforts put in the development of the new OSes which are targeted to different machine and market.