You should probably take such claims with a large dose of salt. With Amigans “paid developers” often turns out to mean something closer to a volunteer who once got a discount on hardware.
Well, I still remember the “good old days” when cool altOSes ideas/projects - such as Unununium Operating Engine - was proliferating and I was very active trying create collaborations between them…
…I still believe that fragmentation disperses developer’s forces and slows the expansion valid and robust alternative OSes.
Anyway those “mature” projects - like Haiku - MUST try to “grab” cool/compatible devs (such as SkyOS’s Robert Szeleney or Syllable’s Kristian Van Der Vliet) IMHO.
That mostly just means no comments… as both are written in Assembly anyway.
Comments, label names, formatting, documentation, git history. All relevant things to understand a codebase, wether written in assembly language or not.
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In the realm of altos Haiku is a bright star. It’s powerful enough to have a full featured web browser like Otter up and running well. KolibriOS at it most potential can only have Netsurf. I don’t have any relationship with OS/2 (since I started as a computer user with Windows XP) so I have no idea about the OS/2 based altos, though. I’m currently a Linux user (SparkyLinux Rolling MATE Editon for clear) and I found most of my familiar terminal tools are there, the bash shell also there, so I choose Haiku.
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eComStation has a port of QT so… they have most of the same programs as Haiku except for the native ones would be different.
They also have Firefox 45
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Git history for a program developed in the late 70 - 80ss in a proprietary company… possibly but not very likely…
I was talking about Menuet and Kolibri here. Not sure about what you mean about the 70s and 80s here, MenuetOS was started in 2000.
Well KolibriOS has it’s 14 years of SVN history: http://websvn.kolibrios.org/log.php?repname=Kolibri+OS&path=%2F&isdir=1&sr=50&er=1&max=40&search=
It would be nice, but I bet that since they quit their leading projects, they have probably lost interest in the scene.
But “capturing” new devs is always a good idea (perhaps starting collaborations with Universities?)
Sorry massive brainfart…
Well, Windows 95 could run on 4mb RAM and was very functional with it.
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Well, it is in early stage and development is almost inactive.
I have a soft spot for Frosted OS. Ok, it’s not an OS for PCs or even SBCs, it’s a POSIX compliant system for microcontrollers with MPUs, but a very cool project (Doom on STM32 anyone?) https://gitlab.com/insane-adding-machines/frosted
I also frequently check how Fuzix, Alan Cox’s unix for retro and low powered machines, is getting on http://www.fuzix.org/
There is also 4.4 BSD unix for pic32mz MCUs https://github.com/sergev/LiteBSD and 2.11 BSD for other pic32s http://retrobsd.org/wiki/doku.php/start
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I honestly dont see it going anywhere
I’ve always enjoyed running and compiling alernative operating systems. This is of course why I’m here 
There’s some great info at https://wiki.osdev.org/Projects as well.
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I miss SkyOS. I put so much time into bug reporting, hunting, playing, etc. with it. I could never understand why Robert Z. never would fix the main problem it had (ever increasing memory usage until it crashed). I had hoped when he lost interest that he would opensource it, but no 
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I can’t base this feeling on anything concrete, but I have always felt when one of these hobbyist OSes does go under and the developer has no plan on ever doing anything else with it in the future… It makes me wonder if the ones that don’t open source everything actually using some open source code, but never admitted it. and they can’t release everything now because then people would be able to see that they were ripping off FOSS code.
Again there’s no way that I can prove that, but that’s kind of the feeling I’ve had about it for quite a while.
Some people are just not into the open source thing. SkyOS was Robert’s own work and it’s totally understandable that he doesn’t want anyone else to continue the project. Imagine if it was someone writing a series of books (say Harry Potter or something). The author has a right to decide that the book series is done. That does not put on them a moral obligation to release it under an open license and allow someone else to continue writing stories or “improving” the existing books?
I think it is well known thqt SkyOS took inspiration and probably some code from our BFS implementation (and our license allows for it, so it’s not a problem).
Better put your bets on Haiku that is a group project from the start and is set up so that people can come and go (and come back) as they want without putting the project at risk.
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And that’s why this project and community has been going for almost 10 years at this point. 