RISC OS Open Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Opening Up Proprietary OS

Two Decades of Open-Sourcing RISC OS

RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL) celebrated its 20th anniversary on June 20, 2026. The company was incorporated in 2006 with the goal of opening up a proprietary operating system to community contributions. Over the past two decades, this ambition has largely been realized, leading to a more developed RISC OS.

Key Milestones and Community Contributions

The journey began in 2006-07 with a shared source initiative, making the first RISC OS sources public. Subsequent years saw more of the OS released to the community, earning ROOL a Drobe award for initiative. A significant achievement in 2008-09 was a build of RISC OS 5 running on an IYONIX with community-contributed code.

Technological advancements included nightly autobuilds for automated testing and Jeffrey Lee's port to the BeagleBoard in 2009-10, which facilitated cheaper RISC OS hardware. The Bounty Scheme, introduced in 2010-11, enabled community-funded development of desired features, and it remains active today.

Expansion to New Platforms

In 2011-12, ROOL, in collaboration with Piccolo Systems, released an open-source SD and MMC filing system, providing native memory-card support for BeagleBoard machines. A major development in 2012-13 was the release of RISC OS Pi, bringing the operating system to the Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-sized computer. This move introduced RISC OS to a new generation of users and significantly increased website traffic.

The year 2013-14 saw the release of RISC OS 5.20, the first stable ROM release in several years, which included support for the classic Risc PC and A7000 family. Additionally, Pico, a stripped-down version of RISC OS that boots directly to a prompt, was released to mark fifty years of BASIC.