SkyOS - The one man project
Post by: zix
It was coded virtually entirely by Austrian Robert Szeleney in his free time. It achieved a relatively usable state on the desktop - especially considering it was a one man project - but it did suffer from what I call the 'ooh shiney!'-syndrome - it was a hobby project for Szeleney, and as such, focus tended to shift around quite often, depending on whatever he wanted to work on at that time.
SkyOS originally started out as a mere bootloader, but eventually expanded into becoming an entire operating system. In the early days - up until version 4.x - SkyOS was freely available, but it wasn't open source (I believe the 1.x versions may have been, though, I can't recall). After that, Szeleney started charging a small fee for access to the SkyOS 5 beta, which some considered controversial. The SkyOS 5.0 release cycle started with its first alpha release in December 2003, and ended with the release of beta build 6947 in August 2008 - a final release never materialised.
The project seemed to fizzle out, but Szeleney did experiment with using third party kernels, like a BSD kernel or a Linux kernel. That was the last we heard of it - and earlier this year, the website went dark.
So, it's quite a surprise to see that over the weekend, Szeleney has made the last beta release of SkyOS 5.0 - build 6947 - available for free. I somehow doubt we'll see development pick up again, but it's nice to have the latest release out in the open for everyone to play with.
