346 karma · joined January 14, 2012
P.A. Semi didn't even exist in 1998. It was founded in 2003, and was acquired by Apple in 2008.
There are easy ways around this lack of official licenses. Ways that I can't/won't go in to here.
Has anyone that has requested a license (Alpha/Itanium) in the last few weeks actually been able to log in to the portal?
A quick web search returns articles claiming the company has been profitable since 2018 and that an IPO may be in the works. I can understand how something like Red Hat has managed to survive over the past twenty years, given the name it has built for itself in the "enterprise" Linux world (for better or worse), but Canonical continuing to operate off the back of Ubuntu has always baffled me.
I’m guessing the mention of Alpha in your comment was a slip of the tongue/brain, given the topic :)
Some people lament the fact that it simply ended up with a plain, general purpose Unix-like, rather than something more low level and immediately direct (as in, drop you to a BASIC, not necessarily assembler), ala Commodore 64.
The peculiarities of the author aside, a live TempleOS was able to have its running code modified on the fly, and allowed direct low level access to what was under the hood in perhaps a more interesting hacker-ish way than your typical Unix clone/descendant.
Obviously you don't get the new features and functionality that may be introduced in an upstream major release, but security patches are covered.
Are you aware of, or did you consider the historical context behind this name? (the operating system, NeXTSTEP)