The 2-hour 'phone conference is over, and I'm continuing to miss the England match to keep you lot informed! The audio recording can now be downloaded (see below), but it's a large file with sound problems due to a dodgy line, so I'll bulletpoint it for you.

Obviously everyone was most concerned with the recent cancellation of RISCOS Ltd's license by Castle Technology Ltd.

• Castle alleged that ROL have been in breach of the license bewteen them since day one of Castle taking it over (which is almost a whole year now).
• Castle say they bought RISC OS lock stock and barrel, down to various bits of software on floppy discs.
• The terms of the license being broken are many, not just to do with payment; the only one they would be drawn on was the availability to third parties of !Printers. Castle say they have not changed the payment for existing licenses.
• RISCOS Ltd. have been using delaying tactics - not replying to requests for meetings, not giving information over that they should be, and not paying the bills.
• Castle feel that they have done everything possible (they didn't wish to make things public at all), and can't see how they could have proceeded differently.
• The rumours that Castle might buy out ROL circulating at the recent show weren't completetly without merit - it seems that Castle have at least thought about buying out a controlling interest, but as they can't get financial records from ROL, this is fraut with problems (such as buying into existing debts). Getting ROL wound up and buying Select etc. from the receiver is very much a last resort.
• Due to confused copyright issues, Castle cannot offer RISC OS 4 as-is to ROL's existing licensees (such as A6). VirtualAcorn is not licensed at all, under the current license between Castle and ROL. However, RISC OS 3.7 or 5 are on the table, and possibly an earlier version of RISC OS 4.
• Castle actually praised ROL for what they have been able to achieve with limited means, but say that it's not really commercially viable. It was mentioned that 8-10 million UKP would be needed to really get RISC OS up to scratch, instead of making small changes.

It will be interesting to see how RISCOS Ltd. responds to all of this.

In other areas, there was a solid "no comment" for any future hardware projects such as laptops, but as Castle gave PDAs as one example of embedded and desktop RISC OS overlapping, a laptop doesn't seem too far-out an idea. Nothing will be said until any project is nearing completion however.

As for future hardware, it seems unlikely that 26bit support is on the cards. 32bit processors running RISC OS 5 are the future according to Castle, and there are no plans for instance to work with ARM7500s. They do say they think desktop RISC OS is still a very important part of their business.

Thanks to Mike Williams, who kept things running smoothly with an impartial hand on the tiller, and of course Jack Lillingston and Peter Wild for answering the questions. And Chris McDrobe for the mention of the TIB poll!

Update:
I've uploaded the full audio of the conference; it cuts out annoyingly, it's poor quality, I've re-encoded it to the lowest setting on this MP3 converter, and you're still looking at a 27MB download. Don't say I didn't warn you.

• Full conference audio (MP3, 27.3MB)