I get the curiosity, but the project’s not something I plan to make open source, now or in the future. That’s just the direction I’ve chosen for it.
Just because the code isn’t public doesn’t mean the work isn’t real — I’m putting a lot into this, and I’m focused on building it the right way. Not every project needs to be open to be legitimate.
Hope that clears things up!
Why on God’s green earth would you make that a requirement, is it ram concerns? I honestly can’t figure out why you’re having a difficult time creating a CLI based OS for the pico when picomite runs perfectly fine on it. Making the Pimoroni a base requirement kills a lot of possible followers. This is more of a personal project at this point. You’d be more successful creating a layered OS that runs on Micro python / picomite at this point if you want community help / guidance. And as for the open-source idea of this, just wait till someone dumps it then re-releases a better version of this for ALL pico devices not just the Pimoroni.
the thing is, the options were for people to buy the Pimoroni or the Pico 2w, if you were already going to need to buy the Pico 2W, why not spend more money and get more ram?
Because the base device ships with the pico 1. Requiring something that a great majority of people won’t upgrade to is dumb. I could understand requiring a wireless pico but that should be its own repo / OS seeing not everyone has access to pico 1w or 2w. I suggest sticking with the Pico seeing there’s plenty of support for it & it ships in the PicoCalc.
The thing is the base Pico, doesn’t have wifi support. And I need wifi support for over-the-net updates and app library. Because I am trying to slowly shift the PicoCalc to be laptop/PC free. Which basically means, that I don’t want it so that people need their laptop/PC every time they want a new app for the OS, or they want to update the OS.
The question I have is why would I create my own software for someone’s personal OS when that OS isn’t free software? If that OS stops getting updated then I’d be up a creek. Whereas with, say, zeptoforth, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow zeptoforth would still be there, and anyone could continue its development.
Of course, you might say “what about Windows or macOS, aren’t they proprietary?” And yes, that is true, and a lot of people are being screwed by Microsoft’s compatibility requirements for Windows 11, or by Apple discontinuing support for Intel Macs (and PowerPC Macs before that). But even then, at least those have large corporations behind them, and are not going to stop being developed simply because the sole developer gets hit by a bus (or, more likely, simply gets bored).
I’ve held off posting this, but figured it might be relevant to this thread, especially since I don’t think anyone has mentioned these elsewhere on the forum.
There are a couple of other open source “OS” projects for the PicoCalc. I haven’t personally tried either, and it seems both are works in progress.
This one leverages the dev’s existing project for the Flipper Zero and other Pi devices, and has some documentation and a video example running on other hardware:
And this one doesn’t seem to be documented yet (beyond the source) and uses Rust (which is part of the reason I haven’t bothered with it). So I’m not sure what the plan is but it still might be interesting for anyone wanting to dig in:
There may be others, but these were easy finds via github search for “picocalc”.
I would consider any of PicoMite, MicroPython, uLisp, or my own zeptoforth an “OS” that can run on the PicoCalc. Sure, they may not be organized in the same fashion as, say, Unix, with a distinct shell program separate from their kernel, but they have all the hallmarks of being OSes. They support loading and executing programs at runtime and have command line shells for user interaction. Saying that they are not “OSes” reflects a limited vision of what an OS is, i.e. either being Unix-like or Windows-like.
It doesn’t matter if they are a large corporation, or not. Just imagine waking up, with someone who stole your code and changed it slightly, like add color graphics or whatever, and then redistributed it, and stole all of your loyal followers/users.
yeah all that you listed are considered an “OS” and so will my Operating System, the main thing is, no one can make comments on it, if they haven’t seen it.
New Devlog:
Yes, nobody has seen it, until people have seen it you’re going to get people who don’t believe anything is happening.
Your posts and videos show zero results so it’s not that weird people don’t believe anything is happening.
I personally strongly disagree with the idea that taking your code, extending it, and redistributing their changes so others can benefit from them is somehow “stealing” your code. After all, you can choose to reintegrate their changes into your original codebase – and you said nothing to suggest that they did anything like removing your license and/or copyright.
Also, you don’t own your users, and if they adopt someone’s modified version of your code because it has features they want that your original code lacks that is perfectly fair – while it is not fair to seek to control your users through making your code proprietary.
In my own case someone once ported zeptoforth to an STM32 platform that I did not myself support, and the only gripe I have is that they did the opposite of the above and didn’t redistribute their changes – meaning I could not pull their changes back into the main zeptoforth source tree.
Would I have licensed zeptoforth differently? No, I want people to be able to freely use, redistribute, modify, and redistribute modified versions of zeptoforth. Also, I want others to freely make contributions to zeptoforth, and it would not be fair to would-be contributors if zeptoforth were proprietary (e.g. if it were under a “shared source” license).
Still showing picomite… I’ll leave it there…
I don’t think OP knows how licenses work.
zeptoforth is my Forth implementation for ARM Cortex-M, and there is (beta) support for the PicoCalc as can be seen in FORTH on the PicoCalc. I was using it as an example of a non-trivial FLOSS project, a combined compiler and OS, which runs on the PicoCalc, for illustrative purposes. I could have used other projects as examples, but then I would not have been able to speak about them from a personal perspective.
I know him.. 
I supposed you understand the GIF 
Astrox was criticized in the clockworkpi discord for using generative AI in his project, so it’s somewhat likely that this is related to the decision to take the repo down for one reason or another. You likely wouldn’t be able to claim copyright on AI generated code for example.
Ahh, that makes sense. Idk why he didn’t just come out and say that.