RISCOS Ltd

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RISCOS Ltd is a UK limited company, created in January 1999 and managed by Paul Middleton. It was formed to continue user-focused development of the RISC OS operating system after the de-listing of Acorn, following Acorn's effective purchase by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in order to benefit from the shareholding that Acorn held in ARM Ltd. In March 1999, RISCOS Ltd obtained exclusive rights to develop and sell RISC OS 4 for the desktop market from Element 14 (the renamed Acorn Computers Ltd). A few weeks later Pace Micro Technologies PLC purchased Acorn's Cambridge headquarters and staff for £200,000 and then continued to develop their own, in-house version of RISC OS, primarily for set-top boxes and other embedded devices.

RISCOS Ltd completed work on RISC OS 4 and in mid-1999 it was released as an upgrade for existing machines. Work then continued on a system of soft-loaded updated versions of the operating system, released under a rolling scheme named RISC OS Select.

In November 2002, Castle Technology Ltd released a modified version of Pace's 32-bit RISC OS as RISC OS 5 for their Iyonix PC, in apparent contravention of the licence agreement that RISCOS Ltd held with Element 14. In July 2003, Castle bought all technology rights to RISC OS from Pace in an attempt to legalise the situation. In January 2004, Castle also took over Tematic Ltd., the company formed by ex-Pace engineers when they were made redundant in March 2003. The result was a long-running and acrimonious dispute between RISCOS Ltd and Castle over licensing, which ultimately lead to Castle claiming to terminate RISCOS Ltd's license to develop, sell and sub-license RISC OS 4. RISCOS Ltd refuted all the claims made and challenged Castle to identify how and from whom they had acquired RISC OS 5. An end to the dispute was signalled when RISCOS Ltd and Castle agreed to work on attempting to merge their development streams and re-unify RISC OS, with Castle's engineers working on key system functionality and RISCOS Ltd on user-facing elements. One of the conditions was that RISCOS Ltd agreed to be renamed RISC OS Developments Ltd.

Castle's Tematic division was dramatically closed in September 2005. As of December 2005, RISCOS Ltd are still trading under the name RISCOS Ltd.

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