SkyOS (Sky Operating System) is a discontinued prototype commercial, proprietary, graphical desktop operating system written for the x86 computer architecture. As of January 30, 2009 development was halted with no plans to resume its development. In August 2013, developer Robert Szeleney announced the release of a public beta on the SkyOS website. This allows public users to download a Live CD of the SkyOS operating system, for testing and to optionally install the system. Development started in 1996 with the first version released in December 1997. Up until version 4.x the OS was freely available. Starting with beta development of SkyOS 5 in 2003, users were required to pay US$30 to get access to beta releases. SkyOS adapted new filesystem SkyFS based on OpenBFS in 2004 and its graphics subsystem was improved in 2006 with support for desktop compositing including double buffering and transparency. The OS also moved to ELF binaries then. The last beta build 6947 was released in August 2008 and there was no status update for several months. As the OS was mainly the work of one man, Robert Szeleney, there was increasing difficulty to add new device drivers. Considering lack of development under Robert Szeleney, going open source was viewed by the tech press as the best option for SkyOS. Although Szeleney tried to bypass the lack of drivers by using a new kernel based on Linux or NetBSD, and reported some progress in this regard, development has not resumed. SkyOS website disappeared in 2013 and final public build from August 2008 was released for free shortly thereafter. More information...
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