OSLib! OSLib! OSLib! Oi! Oi! Oi!
The release of OSLib 7.00 was announced in December by John Tytgat, who said:
On behalf of the entire OSLib development team, I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of OSLib 7.00, an Open Source API for RISC OS development.
The team consists of a number of people, and list of changes since version 6.90 credits John himself, Graham Shaw, Christian Ludlum, John-Mark Bell and several others.
OSLib was originally developed by Jonathan Coxhead while he was employed at Acorn in the mid-1990s. It was written as a private project, but Jonathan ceded the copyright for certain versions to Acorn, which they made available via their FTP site. Jonathan left Acorn in 1995, and continued development of OSLib, releasing version 5.3 in 1998 under the GNU General Public Licence – then version 1 of the licence – but with a small relaxation of the normal GPL conditions. Use of the GPL usually means anything incorporating something covered by the GPL must itself be released under the terms of the GPL, but the relaxation for OSLib means that anything linked with the library may be distributed in any way the developer sees fit – so it can be used to develop proprietory, closed source software.
The very brief features list presented in the announcement of version 7.00 was as follows:
- GCCSDK GCC 4 (ELF) support
- RISC OS 5 and RISC OS 6 SWI API support
- Vala binding support
- and the usual set of bug fixes and improvements
A much more detailed list of changes since version 6.90 is available on the SourceForge pages for the library.
