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What Would Happen To Linux If BeOS Were GPL'd?
j2demelo writes: "What would happen to Linux if BeOS were to be released under the GPL? How much competition, if any, would this bring upon Linux? I for one would love to see it happen. It would mean another low-cost alternative to Windows on the desktop, allowing computer manufacturers to reduce prices even more. We know Linux isn't currently ready for mainstream desktop use. Could the open sourcing of BeOS give it the kick-in-the-butt it needs?" Before you all start the advocacy wars, I'd like to point out that if BeOS was converted to an Open Source License, it would not mean the end of either OS by a long shot. Competition in markets usually means an improvement of the products in that market, that would mean that both Be and Linux would have to improve. What improvements would both OSes make and how would this affect the Open Source Operating Systems market?
Fucking bullshit and a very lame try bastard. Put any page's name in front of @ and it will show up. Son of a whore.
Most likely, the good points of the BeOS architecture would be incorporated into Linux... and some things in Linux would go into BeOS (do to released licensing pressure). This would be a very good thing for linux... but mostly on a usability side.
:) is that it doesn't make radical enough changes. Distributions are all so alike, that it's sickening. It would be much more interesting if they tried a fundementally different architecture. Perhaps apple's work could be just another "distro" of Linux (I know they aren't based on linux. The point being that they actually tried a different naming heirarchy... wow. ;)
Unfortunately, a lot of the cool things that BeOS can do are because of the overall architecture. It is highly unlikely that the fundemental unix like architecture of linux will change. Instead, we will have to wait for a preemptible, pageable kernel to get developed. Then wait for filesystems to get far enough along to support "interesting" things.
Linux's main problem (which is also the source of much success...
Anyways, one could claim that the Linux community is very good at cloning prior art, but not very receptive to radical developments of it's own.
-Chris
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
I question the reasoning in Cliff's comment after the story. He's citing the common idea that competition in a free market results directly in an improvement in the competing products, and I'm not sure this applies to the OS community in such a direct way. After all, how much pressure to improve itself has Linux felt from *BSD? What about Darwin or the Hurd? Being newer than most to the community, I put this as a question to those of you who would know it firsthand.
-- "Perhaps the truth is less interesting than the facts?" -Amy Weiss, RIAA
I would love to see BeOS gpl'd
I have used it before and love it, the only problem is that Be has a relativley small team of developers and they don't have enough driver support for the things on my existing computer, I would have to get another one to run it right.
I don't really see that it would compete with Linux in all that big of a way.
I remember an interveiw with Linus on a radio station here in seattle (99.9 kisw for those of you reading from here) where he said that he had created it because nothing else really suited the way he wanted to use a computer and he wasn't really trying to compete with windows he just wanted their to be more choices the same way that "Mac" is a choice.
Is this just a "what if?" question or has something been hinted at from Be?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
another data point arguing for the importance of platform-neutral file formats and programs which produce them by default.
... how would you like medical charts that required every doctor who wanted to look at them and even had your permission couldn't do so without having the same brand of printer that created them?
...
To argue for that, let me argue for a second against the opposite situation;)
Microsoft Word, though I'm not a fan, is an adequate program for manipulating strings of words. It has find-and-replace (my favorite missing feature in pine;) ), a spelling checker, etc. Without getting into my particular complaints, I concede that many people like MS Word. But MS Word *could* be a morally / aesthetically acceptable program to me for all its failings, but it's not now. Why? Because its default file format is obfuscated and proprietary, and requires someone else to have either their own copy of Word or a special limited-purpose reader, and is difficult on anything but a Mac or Windows-running PC.
That's lunacy. Analogies fail. It's as if
At any rate, I'd like to see an open sourced BeOS (not that it seems to be in the cards) if it would poke people with the idea that HTML, SGML, RTF, plain text and other such *un*obfuscated formats are the way to go. Documents in (even half-decent) HTML I think will be more likely legible than Word version X in 20, 30, 100 years.
Anyhow, the continuing rant
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
ok, i'm probably going to get moderated down for saying this, but... probably nothing. the open sourcing of other operating systems, darwin from the MacOS and plan9 haven't done anything to linux. the open sourcing of beos (which is _HIGHLY_ unlikely) would have NO effect on linux, aside from a few kernel patches if the license would permit (which it wouldn't). so, rob, can't you find a better way to generate more traffic? here's a few ideas for you to help add a few more $ to the money bin (like from duck tales haha)
Ask Slashdot: which is better, freebsd or linux?
Ask Slashdot: should i replace my NT server with linux?
Ask Slashdot: is mysql ready for the enterprise?
all of these discussions are just ploys to generate banner ad revenue. but, i KNOW that there have to be lots of decent stories out there getting rejected, just look at k5, it's pretty decent.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
I actually think BeOS is the coolest desktop OS I have ever used. Just to keep the record straight, I normally use and develop for Linux, and have played with everything Windows, Linux, OpenStep, Be, MacOS, and a couple others, but by no means every single OS out there. But in the end in my mind BeOS wins. It is really snappy, has a greay interface (a little rough around the edges every once and a while, but really cool nonetheless), and keeps things simple on the surface. But if you want, there is also that command line that lets you run all kinds of Unixy stuff a little deeper in the OS. So, basically you have a Unix-like OS (definitely not a flavor of Unix, but modeled after the same idea) that has a wonderful, very fast interface built in - Like OSX, only a lot better! The whole graphical nature of the OS is built in (unlike X on Unixes), meaning things like driver updates, time changes, etc (the normal maintenence stuff) is easy, but behind it is the power of a Unix like system. This is probably about the tenth time I have said it, but I think that is a really great design.
So, why do I use Linux more that Be, even though I like it so much? One real reason - I know more about Linux, have more apps that I use a lot under Linux, and don't have a big enough hard drive to give both a respectable amount of space. So, in the future I may easily swith to Be full time (as long as they don't drop the OS for BeIA) and make use of the X server that has been ported to it for any X stuff I need. But I think Be really has a great product on their hands.
Posted from the wireless couch.
At the risk of being attacked brutally...
I think that more people cling to the GPL because of linux than the other way around. I don't see a lot of people screaming towards the HURD project, which is a pretty good concept.
I think that more people attack the BSD license because of what certain advocates say, rather than the licenses actual content. I am a BSD user. Anybody who has seen my car knows this.
I think that a lot of BeOS would get incorporated into Linux, but it would take time, especially considering the parts that are fundamentally incompatible, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion.
And BeOS isn't going GPL. Why don't we talk about if Solaris or SysV or HURD, oh wait, that is GPL, go GPL instead.
What would happen if every linux project switched to the BSD license? Would everyone leave linux and switch to BSD?
(BTW, I also have a Linux box that I use the hell out of)
Eh...
You make a pretty big assumption here... that being that BeOS itself is not a "rock solid OS" and porting it's GUI to linux would help.
This really isnt the case. BeOS itself is just as stable as Linux. Nearly everything runs as a server on top of the kernel, and if it crashes, it just restarts that server.
As far as porting the Be GUI to linux, it also couldnt happen. It would require basically recreating the Be API from scratch, and rewriting almost all of the linux kernel due to different ways of handling scheduling and threading.
In fact, large chunks of the Be GUI are already opensourced at opentracker.org, but porting it to linux would be VERY difficult.
With all these problems, doesn't it seem more likely that people would start porting the various linux libraries to BeOS? The end result would be the same really, but to assume that linux would be the better solution to start building on is probably incorrect.
you want a capable file manager. use ls -R and navigate. I have rarely ever found any gui "file manager" even remotely useable. I cringe every time I see one of my users or staff trying to do something in "NT Explorer". Its useless for god's sake. les see, les spend 20 minutes point and click, associate a damn extension to notepad to find out what the fuck some other programmer was doing and then struggle with a damn gui editor when all you want was to cruise through a few lines of code to see if that was the damn file you wanted to see in the first place. A good command line shell will save you more hours than you'll spend learning how to use it. Don't give me this I just want to get my work done shit either. If you are IS/IT/MIS/programmer that don't cut it at all. Put the time in to learn to use tools that people have worked years to perfect not the "I don't want to learn what ls -R|more" means or ls -R | grep "filename.h" does. just time yourself sometime. how long does it take to type in ls -R|grep xxx.h and then how long does it take to click this directory, that directory, another directory. oh! we're getting close, click this directory.
:)
i ain't even going to apologize for the 4 scotch rant
I strongly believe that the best strenght of the GNU/Linux OS is that pepole using it are not clueless endusers. We are definitely different users, using a different OS. We build good/stable/secure linux systems because we know what we are doing. The reputation of linux is strongly based on that fact.
As linux will gain shares of the desktop markets, I fear this reputation will dissapear...
Furthermore, because of the graphic/multimedia nature of the BeOS I think it would be a much better fit for the desktop, especially if it become open source!
--
delete free(system.gc);
So, this is another case of nVidiaism. They have contracts with other people which disallow them from opening the source. Stop bickering about it. Stop dreaming about it. It just ain't gonna happen.
Even if it could happen, I wouldn't want it to. All you linux zealots would dive in and try and start 'fixing' things. Then we'd get a "microkernel" as large as that monolithic piece of shit linux 2.4.0.
-G
BeNews Editor
Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Be in Your Senses
If Be was going to even stand a chance, they'd have to come up with a mascot as cute as Tux.
I just don't see that happening.. unless they used a porcupine that, instead of needles, had pixie sticks. I love those things.
Marketshare!=success. Even if they gained 100% market share, if they're giving away their product they won't make a cent on it.
--
OK. Flame retardant suit on.
:)
It would be, just, the greatest thing. Unix/Linux/BSD could get on with what they were designed to do, be a multiuser operating system. We could all concentrate fully and properly on what ought to be everyone's number one concern: Making DAMN CERTAIN Win2K server/advanced server/datacentre server never gets a foothold. Keep that damn thing on the desktop, at most.
Use all these vast quantities of effort currently going into, well: making X do things it was not designed to do; trying to get open source drivers for video cards and having to reverse engineer things; ditto sound cards; in fact anything to do with persuading very good server operating systems to work on the desktop.... And point it towards doing great things server side. Let's see a damn good debugger for Zope; Some clever stuff to do with hot swap PCI; Lots of top notch hardware failure tolerant work; Innovate, dammit, you know you can.
And with the people that want to squeeze that last 5 fps? Or those who want to make nano-small virtual machines for running applets etc. Fine. Good. Great even. Use something that was designed for it from the ground up.
I guess that's the point. An open source Be would be just wonderful on the desktop. Unix is just wonderful on the server. Wouldn't it be great to use the right tool for the job?
Here comes the napalm....
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
You're making the assumpotion that the only reason that someoen would develop an OS would be so that they could create the **best* OS on a technical front.... maybe open sourcing BeOS would create a better" OS, but Be,inc, the driving force behind the BeOS would not... and that'd be detrimental to the BeOS in the end. How would be stand to make money? Who'd pay their architects to devise improvements to their OS?
Yes, LInux has grown under the open source umbrella, but it still remains quite a few leaps and bounds from the reformity that BeOS possess...
Be was going to revolutionize the world: It didn't.
Be was going to sell the hottest boxes: They stopped.
Be was going to challenge Apple on their own hardware: They didn't.
Be was going to be THE "Multimedia OS": Disapeared from sight.
Be was going to take the x86 world by storm: Not even a breeze.
Be was going to break down the initial-investment barrier by releasing a no-price version: Nobody cared.
Be is going to become an important embedded OS: We'll see.
Fer goodness sakes - they can't give it away, why is making it Open Source gonna change things?
A couple of headlines, a two-day wonder, a surge in downloads then pretty much the same things that's been happening all along to Be - not much. First it'll get picked over for whatever goodies can be gleaned from it, a few more zealots will join the Be camp, a couple bug-reports will be sent in, several even with a pointer to the relevant code. Beyond that - snoozer.
There are lot's of kewl OS's out there ranging from LISP machines to Oberon to nano-kernels - nobody cares .
Be does offer more then the typical niche-OS but nothing so incredible it's a must-have. It doesn't scratch any itch that can't be scratched otherwise. It doesn't offer any dramatic price or performance benefits that can't be papered over with the standard quantities of green-stuff. It isn't a developer's-dream or a user's-delight or an administrator's-joy: It's nice enough at all of these but it's not so outstanding at any of them to make it an imperative.
Worse yet it's a horse in an increasingly crowded field. Aside from the MS stable of OS's (what - a dozen or so variations out now?) there's of course the Linuxen, various BSD's, Apple's dark-horse Darwin/MacOS X, QNX, and a couple of bajillion boutique & school-project OS's. Be is just one more small-OS trying to make the jump to the big-leagues.
More power to it but Open-Sourcing ain't gonna be the break that makes it all happen for them. A half-dozen commercial OS's have been Open Sourced in the past year or so & none of them have benefited greatly from it. Heck, Apple even packages their Darwin for x86, a platform they're not even on & the active outside developers on it can be counted on one hand - a maimed hand at that.
I honestly like Be - they've got some great stuff, but I just don't see them getting much out of Open Sourcing, certainly not enough to chance chance eroding their existing advantages. It may be A Good Thing in the big order of the universe but in the pay-the-bills world it wouldn't seem to be a prudent move for them.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Say you have just downloaded 100 pics off your digital camera, and they're named pic00001.jpg through pic00100.jpg - and say you have a GUI filemanager with thumbnail display of graphics... tell me, how is your CLI going to help you pick out the 10 pictures you took of your dog faster than I can point and click on the 10 icons with a little picture of my dog inside them?
Tab-completion only works when you have files with dissimilar names.
Grep only works on text files.
Ls only works if you don't need to preview your files in any way - I guarantee you it's faster for me to double-click on 20 different mp3s to hear the first few seconds than it is for you to type (including tab-completion) mpg123 St[tab]n[tab]*beep*[ctrl-D]G[tab]-Girl[tab][enter] . Same goes for images.
Not to mention being able to select many files with vastly different names (such that wildcard globbing wouldn't work) and manipulate them - there's another operation where GUI filemanagers are a definite plus.
Linux and BeOS are made for different sorts of people. BeOS is to Unix (Linux in particular) what MacOS is to Windows, in terms of simplicity of interface. We won't get into superiority arguments between Windows and MacOS users.
BeOS does not follow standards that are close to anything in the Unix world. In fact, now that I think about it, MacOS X seems to be a lot like BeOS. People who use Linux want a free, light Unix to use on their hardware. People who use BeOS want MacOS with bash.
I don't think GPL'ing BeOS will change that. For most people, the attraction with BeOS is that it is so foreign... I have been quite curious about it. However, there is a cost-free version available for download, and it will even install itself in spare partitions if you please. Freedom to modify the code will improve userbase very little.
Of course, I'm talking only about workstations and servers here. Maybe it turns out that BeOS is remarkably scalable, and fits well in the embedded world. This will of course change the prospects of Linux making it into embedded electronics.
I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.
But thats the point!
The average user i.e. someone like me, or my wife wants something that CAN do everything. It doesn't HAVE to do everything well, but it DOES have to do it REASONABLY well. Windows has that, MAC has that does any other OS?
I don't think so.
I DON'T want to dual boot, I want to use a single STABLE (sorry windows) OS that has lots of app's. I (as an average user) DON'T GIVE A SHIT about who owns what, what license it's under (almost true,i care, but if I really want the software, the license is irrelevant, even though I usually disagree with it) but I do care about cost, stability and USABILITY.
Bloatware, BSOD's, and incompatibilities are the BANE of modern software. These "features" are what causes people to stick with what they're given, cause, it's easier, AND 'cause there really isn't much of a difference anyway!
*CAVEAT** Written from the viewpoint of Joe Blow User and His Wife Jane.
Just because Linux is open source it doesn't mean it's in a special class of it's own - it still has maintenance and other costs associated with the TCO that Windows and Be have associated with them.
Linux developers should think this way because if they did, then Linux would be much easier to use than it is now.
Cheers,
Daniel.
--
Daniel Zeaiter
daniel@academytiles.com.au
http://www.academytiles.com.au
ICQ: 16889511
And anyway, sometimes you have to let your work go. If you want to do more than one or two things for the OSS community you often need to leave it to others to take up your work whilst you go and do something else. Bit like children. You just have to let them go. If the code's any good and the function compelling enough it will leave you anyway (yes including Linus and the kernel he started). Get over it.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I think opening up BeOS would be pretty great, but I don't like this mantra that "competition is always good", because it's not. Just look at the wonderous results of the browser war - there have been hardly any improvements whatsoever in web technology since that competition started. And how about the original fracturing of UNIX? Competition is only good if all the players are honorable and open minded - aiming to win by being the best for the users. Otherwise it just turns into a snakefight.
Be already has most of these things:
:)
High-quality word processor - Check...(Gobe)
Spreadsheet - Check...(Gobe again)
Good web browser - Not completly ready, but hows opera 4.01 sound?
Add these together, with a few great high end apps, and many apps ported from linux, and you end up with a hell of a good OS, even for newbies. With the new BeOS networking and OpenGL, I see no reason at all why Be should not be a great OS, for anyone. IMO, Linux could learn a few things from BeOS, and vice versa. BeOS could teach linux how to be good on the desktop, and Linux would teach Be how to be a great Multi-User OS, which is the only thing that appears to be lacking from Be. The apps will come, eventually. I could use BeOS 100% of the time already, if it werent for games. I sense a new wave of game development ahead though, because of the new OpenGL implementation in Be, which is BTW faster than either windows or linux, and has no drop in framerate even when running in windowed mode.
Shit adds up at the bottom...
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Besides the fact that BeOS isn't going to be GPL'd anytime soon there is also the fact that that BeOS and Linux were created to do two compleatly different things.
BeOS was developed as a multimedia OS, and Linux was developed as a Server OS. The optimizations that are required for one would destroy the other. ie you can have the kernel doing the majority of it's processing with a video render or have apache running at full speed.. not both.
To paraphrase the perl advoticy article... there is no one OS for every task. Just like PHP is easier than Perl for certian projects, BeOS is easier than Linx for certian tasks.
To clarify for our non-geek readers... Both a hammer and a screwdriver will put a screw through a board... but only one was designed to do so..
Dave
btw: no I can't spell... I code for a living
Whats the point of being grown up if you can't act childish sometimes? ---- Dr Who
Which graphics card did you get that BeOS doesn't support?
Writing graphics drivers is really icky business. Even when you do have documentation, it is frequently cryptic, and missing important bits. Even docs from Intel, which are about the finest I've seen anywhere, often omit small details (like the formula for calculating the coefficients for the pixel clock PLL).
Don't have documentation? Congratulations, you're SOL, and reduced to disassembling the BIOS ROM, or picking through the source code contributed to the XFree86 Project. And if you think having XFree86 source code makes driver writing cake, you may care to have a look at the v3.3.6 code for the NVidia GeForce, or the v4.0 code for the SMI Lynx (which has whacking great bugs in it). Or best yet, the code for the NeoMagic laptop chips. (Note that this is no slam against the XFree86 guys; I'm just pointing it out that it's not a panacea.)
There's tens of thousands of Linux contributors. There's only 100 or so people at Be, who really are dancing as fast as they can.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Here's an interesting idea: If there's a feature in BeOS that you like, why not implement it in Linux? There's nothing about Be's code that is so earth shattering that it couldn't be replicated with a little ingenuity. The problem with implementing some of Be's features in Linux, such as their unique file system, is that it would break compatibility.
Linux is still a Unix clone and has all of the benefits and shortcomings thereof. And before you get on your horse and claim "BeOS is based on Unix too!", it is not. Nor is it based on Linux, BSD or any other clone of Unix. Be did implement a Born Again Shell so BeOS could run most POSIX compliant programs. However, that's where Unix compatibility ends. BeOS was written from the ground up, including the kernel, with performance in mind. From a programming perspective (I have over 25 years experience, I might add), BeOS's API wins hands down over all other major operating systems. As for BeOS's lack of drivers and applications: Anyone with technical knowledge of the hardware can write a driver for BeOS. There is documentation on Be's Web site and many examples, BeOS and the development tools are free for the time it takes to download. If there is an application you would like to see on BeOS, by all means write it!
I personally don't think either BeOS or Linux would benefit from BeOS being GPL'd. In fact, I think that BeOS might suffer from too many ingredients in the pot. For example, if I install Red Hat using the "Gnome Workstation" option, it takes up somewhere in the neighborhood of a gigabyte of storage space. This is heinous bloat, most of which the average user (or even programmer) would never use. But trying to make heads or tails of what packages are actually needed would be impossible for the non geek.
What if lawyers suddenly became honest?
Imagine if the legal sharks out there stopped pursuing lawsuits that are based upon dubious claims and wholly intended to make their clients a fast buck? What if they suddenly became ethical and just flat out refused to work for companies like Rambus? What if socialists who are busy in some cities suing firearms companies, for supposed damages because hood rats are using guns to kill each other, just couldn't find a lawyer worth snot to pursue the case for them?
Guess what, it ain't gonna happen so why waste time wondering about it?
Or how about this, what if D-O-G spelled cat?
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
It's not possible to GPL what remains proprietary from Be (because of it's partners, or because it would require substantional engineering effort to clean up the code for release, that is: someone must pay for it to happen). However, the source code that most developers desire, the Tracker and Deskbar is available on http://www.opentracker.com. And the developer tools are not limited to the professional version either.
To quote from Be's website:
However, Companies who develop software for BeOS desktop PCs are encouraged to take advantage of free resources like BeOS Personal Edition, BeOS development tools, and more. It is possible to create quality BeOS software without paying a dime.
If you think there's no applications, check out http://www.bebits.com
unlike linux which was based on 70' technology that was based on using text based dumb terminals.
And I suppose you drive an electric car because petrol engines are 100 year-old technology.
theres 'find' and then there's 'locate'
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
So what happens if you open source BeOS depends almost entirely on how good the guy who leads GPL BeOS. I'm not trying to say that Linus is the only one who's done any work on Linux (indeed, as many of you will hasten to point out, most of "Linux" doesn't even have anything to do with the kernel), but he has been responsible in a large part for keeping people interested in the OS, and getting them to help out. It's just like a business. You've got crappy management, it doesn't really matter how good your product is.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
1. BeOS and Linux made more compatible and make them able to run each others binaries.
2. The focus of Linuxdevelopment is moved to serverapplications, while BeOS takes over as the GNU desktop-OS. Also try to move them towards a common Windowing-system, common tools etc.
Market the two as two sides of the same thing. GNU/Be (Try to pronounce it), the desktopOS and GNU/Linux the serverOS.
Kind of like Win98 vs. WinNT, only both much more stable.
I do believe in Linux as a desktop-OS, but we don't have the best foundation available.
Now.. BeOS will not be GPL'd anytime soon.
Heresy! X is tradition, dammit. We can't break with tradition. We have to keep X with its gaping security holes, its unpredictable behavior, and its massive code-bloat. We can't do anything new, because that wouldn't be traditional. Screw the non-techie users. We don't want Linux on the desktop anyway, that means people who aren't hard-core geeks could use it, and we wouldn't be 1337 anymore. Jeeze, what the hell are you thinking? Abandoning X and going with something new that works would break with tradition, and we all know that violates the cardinal tenets of the Church of *nix. Remember the First Commandment: Change is bad in the *nix world.
As far as I know Apple has published the source to all the BSD stuff they have touched. The closed source parts of OS-X are things they wrote in house (like DisplayPostscript, er, DisplayPDF I mean, the OS 8 compatability box, and the candy coated GUI).
That is pretty much like the TiVo people giving back the few Linux kernel mods they did (I don't think they gave back the filesystem, since they use a kernel loadable module there, but I donno for sure). I know they don't give back their candy coated GUI. A shame, because there are a few little tweaks I would like to make...
Yes, with the GPL you are required to give back changes in many cases. With the BSDL you are never required to give them back. So Apple is either "being good people (at long last)", or "playing the PR game". TiVo is "walking the fine line guided by their lawyers".
Does the TiVo make you uncomftrable?
If BeOS would be distributed in an OpenSource or GPL license I think it would cause little impact on Linux. What really would cause it may be a boom on multimedia, together with all *NIX.
BeOS is clearly superior to any other OS in terms of multimedia. The fact it is free for the masses is already a big +. However I suspect that this hampers some threads of development. Specially integration with other OSes. If this barrier would be overturned then I believe we could see BeOS suddenly appearing as a *NIX visual interface. There are lots of things on *NIX that demand good quality graphics and sound. And *NIX is surely not the best for that job. Even Linux still looses a lot here. Having the BeOS sources. people could try to overcome these limitations by combining tasks between *NIX computers and BeOS. BeOS is probably the nearest OS to *NIX in this field so that integration could be quite powerful. Imagine a powerful Beowulf cluster calculating 3D virtual worlds and BeOS stations showing it... Yes it is possible now. But still I believe that open source would make a much better job. Specially on what concerns kernel interaction. Clusters could be more tightly integrated for example. Maybe BeOS would be not a station but a cluster member with different tasks.
Yeah, well have you seen RedHat's lately? Not exactly a hot commodity.
TIVO is doing a little more than they are actaully required to by the GPL.
Anyone who wants to can download TIVO's kernel mods, but the GPL really only requires them to give it to people who have the binaries.
If TIVO wanted to be jerks, they could require you to send in the UPC code for your TIVO before they would mail you a floppy disk with the kernel code on it. Of course, that would actually be more work for them, and it would be bad press, so there's no advantage.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Can't argue too much there.
or DOS -> OS/2 -> NT
Wrong. DOS was not the foundation of OS/2. OS/2 had a layer that could emulate DOS calls when the programs were run but it was written from the ground up. I'm not going to argue too much on NT taking from OS/2 as many parts were canabalized like the filesystem but NT is a different horse with a very different design.
or MULTICS -> UNIX -> MINIX -> LINUX
BeOS is written from scratch with out all the age-old crap underneath. I'd say in the time they've been on x86 and the rate their gaining that Windows AND Linux just better stay the fuck out of the way.
Many OSs have been written from scratch. Technical supperiority does not lend oneself to being the market dominator. I believe market dominance has more to do with how many apps users want or need are avaliable on that OS. The free/open source OSs are the exception as many users wrote the applications they wanted. What is the BeOS's killer app? It might be a great OS but without a killer app it has no future.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
More then required by the GPL and the binary module exception, yes.
My point wasn't that TiVo are bad guys (I don't think they are), but that what Apple is doing with BSD is pretty much the same thing TiVo is doing with Linux, so if one doesn't like what Apple is doing, don't think the GPL on Linux saves it from the same fate.
I do admit Apple could have done "worse", but that wasn't what the previous poster said. The were upset about OSX, and wanted to stick to GPL'ed things to prevent that.
Sure, and if they wanted to be jerks they would take a hard stance against hacking the TiVo and see if they could get all the bad press iOpener and CueCat got too. But they have the totally reasonable stance "if you open it and play with it that's cool, but if you break it don't call customer support for anything other then laughter".
A shame about that no-ethernet and no-firewire thing though.
Wow. BeOS actually gets mentioned on /. twice in a week? Something must be up. Is Malda out of town? Just kidding ;) Actually, this is a pointless subject. Linux users don't like BeOS because they feel threatened, and BeOS users don't like Linux because they envy their success. The partisans on both sides will keep spewing their rhetoric ("64bit FS, MediaOS, multi-threading, speed"/"focus shift, dead, non-OSS") and the conversation will do nothing more than to raise my blood pressure at the diehards on both sides who are unwilling to admit the faults of their OS. Without further ado, I'd like to throw my 3 cents into the ring
/etc and I barf. Ugly as an ape's ass. Modules.conf is a travesty in this age of Plug & Play. SysV initscripts are ridiculous. (BSD all the way! ;) modprobe? Why? In order to enable NAT on Linux, I have to recompile my kernel, edit modules.rc to load the ip_nat modules, and edit rc.firewall to setup the firewall rules and enable NAT. On BeOS, I copy the nat module to to net_server add-ons directory, I start up the configurator, use the defaults, and hit "Nat ON" And voila, it's on. To change my refresh rate, I go to the screen preferences and change it to a nice 85hz. In XFree86, I had to write a BeOS program that would get me the modelines and add a modline to XF86Config. Do you realize how many newbie Linux users are sitting there destroying their eyes because XFree86 doesn't think that their monitor can do 1152x864x85 (mine does that res at 90-something hz)? That's just wrong. To install ALSA, I have to edit modules.conf and give it a huge string of parameters telling it stuff that it should get from PnP anyway. In BeOS, it just loads and the only tweeking I have to do is what volume the mixer should be at. After recompiling kernel 2.4, I have to go to modules.conf and edit it to tell it that ne2k is a network driver. In BeOS, the cards are already detected and awaiting IP addresses in Network Prefrerences.
Advantages of BeOS over Linux:
1) It's faster. As someone who has used (and tweeked) most of the popular Linux distros, I can say that BeOS is certainly faster.
2) It has more "creature comforts." Stuff like attributes on the FS, the simple API, and obsessive attention to details like good drag and drop, good interoperabiltiy between apps, standardized interfaces, etc, really shows up in the amount of polish the OS has.
3) It scales. If you're an intermediate user, use the preferences menu for everything. With it, you can set up a telnet/NAT/ftp server with a couple of clicks. More hardcore than that? Edit the text files directly.
/etc and vi are only a terminal away.
4) It has a good app-base. A lot of the most common desktop usage apps are there, and a most of the apps are high-quality and useful. Also, almost all POSIX-text-mode apps are easily portable, so BeOS has ports of nifty stuff like compilers, language parsers, imaging libraries, and even full-blow subsystems like SANE. Plus, it has SAMBA, Apache, and dozens of other common *NIX apps. But wait, it gets better. There is an X server that is being worked on (on hiatus pending release of BONE and the new network API) and a port of Wine on the way. Lastly, BeOS currently rules the roost in terms of innovative audio apps.
5) It is easier to manage. I see
Disadvantages of BeOS vs Linux.
1) Linux will always have superior networking. BeOS just wasn't designed to put an emphasis on processes that simply move data around (TCP/IP stacks) and no matter how well designed the new network environment (BONE) is, the 3ms task slice (vs 50ms for Linux) and the pseudo/kinda/maybe realtime sheduling will work against BeOS here. But that's okay, its a client OS anyway.
2) Linux (even better, FreeBSD) has superior filesystem performance. A process that simply moves data around the filesystem will get about 20% better performance on ReiserFS than BFS. That's okay too. Unless you're a file server, you don't notice the lowered performance. Again, the OS simply wasn't designed to put a priority on just moving data around. As such, you'll see Bonnie scores 20% lower, but with half to a third of the processor usage.
3) It still doesn't have as many GUI apps. Browsers are limited to Opera 3.6.x, Netpositive, and Opera4 (soon, maybe) Of course, there is always Mozilla, and the BeOS builds are progressing everyday. Recently, BeOS has been getting some more support in the app area, and if BeIA pans out for Be (which those anti-BeOS idiots would know, if they ever read BeNews, has been getting a LOT of industry support) then we could be seeing more desktop apps out.
4) It doesn't have as large of a developer community.
5) Be's role in all this is iffy. The focus shift hurt, but if those anti-BeOS idiots would ever read BeNews, development on BeOS is far from stopped. Right now, there are the game_audio, OpenGL, BONE, and Java2 SE ports all being worked on. I can guarentee you the slate of distros being released with Linux 2.4 will not have all these updates.
Then there are the ties. Of them, the most annoying is probably hardware support. Yes, BeOS supports less hardware than Linux. No, you can't buy any of that unsupported hardware outside a flea market. Aside from the 3D part of the NVIDIA chips present in all my computers, all of my computers have full support for BeOS. And this isn't all standard hardware either. My PIII motherboard is one of those MicroATX all-in-one jobs from a fly-by-night company. Hell, it took me half an hour just to find out who made the sucker. Yet, everything from the network chip, the sound chip, the graphics chip, they're all supported in BeOS.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
A) No you don't need OS source. It's nice, but BeOS drivers don't live in a communal heap of code all take from the same source tree. (I always thought of the Linux driver thing as somewhat incenstuous. Its scary that drivers are all developed together and depend on each other.)
B) You'd still need man hours to port all of the drivers. BeOS drivers are very different from Linux drivers.
C) As I recall, the XFree86 license doesn't require you to redistribute code, so its not like any vid cards will get supported that aren't already.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
In my humble opinion, Be is greatly superior to both Linux and Windows. Before I'm moderated down as Flamebait, I want to point out that I have a triple-boot system, and have the experience in all three to make a pretty valid asessment.
Windows is sort of easy, very popular, and has excellent driver support. If it was honestly as bad as people say, it wouldn't exist because people WOULD look elsewhere. Windows is at least good enough for the unwashed masses.
Linux is an interesting experiment and a powerful *nix, especially for the money. The problem is it IS hard to use. Even KDE and GNOME only scratch the surface. It is a system built on a very old specification, and it shows. Users (not newbies, just users) want to use the system, not tweak it endlessly. Recompiling the Kernel, Libraries, and Apps to get good performance (mine sucked until I did the above) is time consuming, overly technical, and more than even many power user would be willing to do. Linux is a great *nix, but not a great Desktop OS.
Be is the youngest and still has a ways to go, but it shows the most promise. I fear it will die off because of Windows dominance or a shift to IAs by Be, but I hope not. It is very responsive, contains no overtly legacy code, has an Object Oriented API, boots in seconds (while MS tweaks Windows to get 3x the boot time), and is very stable. The only reason I don't use BeOS more is its small Application support and the fact that I haven't figured out PPPoE on Be yet and I can't live without my DSL.
I see an Open Source Be being disected and pasted on Linux (Bad Idea), being fractured as hackers paste on *nix concepts (Worse Idea), or being left to die by a community already focused on Linux (A Tradjedy). I hope Be makes it, but I don't think that the magic balm of OSS is the key. More likely Be would die a quick death as OSS, especially after the proprietary code (from other companies) is culled to keep copyright lawyers happy.
20meg for a windowing server? That's criminal. That means that of the 40MB or so that Linux takes up on my system, half of that is X?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
truetype fonts work wonderfully
>>>>>>
Well, they work. And uh, I can load them. And umm, it doesn't crash when using them... BUT, they look aweful, all jaggedy. And its not just the lack of anti-aliasing, X fonts genuinely suck. But they DO work.
3d graphics are extremely fast
>>>>>>>>
No they are not. Even Windows 2000 (which isn't exactly the pinnacle of OS design) is 30% or so faster. And that's only because NVIDIA was nice enough to give X some pro-caliber drivers. (BTW, the NVIDIA drivers are around 20-30% faster on average than the stock XFree ones for 2D primitives)
stability is good
>>>>>>>>>>
I'll give you that.
X remote display works well even over a modem link
>>>>>>>>
True.
and even the notorious X bloat has been put on a diet
>>>>>>>>
Wow. Look mom! I lost 200lb and I now only weigh 350!
There are many well known defiencies, such as limited suport for drawing primitives, lack of alpha channel support, not to mention lack of dynamic resolution/ color depth changing
>>>>>>>
Which all other windowing systems have had forever
but they are all comming down the pipeline
>>>>>>>>>>
Real soon now!
Not to mention that it is still a bitch to configure and for something that has been worked on so much, it is quite underhwelming.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
QNX Photon is small, fast, featureful, has great fonts, and has remote display to boot. In other words, it's every thing X should be, but isn't.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
A) I get the 30% from the tests AnandTech and TomsHardware did of the 3D performance between Windows2K and Linux. And if you get the same performance with Win2K and Win98 for OpenGL, then there is something wrong with your setup (Win2K is significantly faster for most OpenGL apps)
B) I use Netscape6.
C) XF86Setup won't help anything. I have no problem using xf86config, it's a perfectly user-friendly program. Even the XF86Config file is pretty friendlY (nicely commented) What my problem is that there is no setting that allows you to set your refresh rate, and X-4 is limited to VESA modes, which means that getting anything above 75Hz on your 1152x864 monitor means getting modelines. Of course, modelines have a 30page HOWTO explaining them, and not everybody has a BeOS machine they can access and steal modlines from. (BeOS autodetects monitor modes) Its a moot point anyway. XFree86Config only exists because X is too stupid to detect anything for itself. About the only thing that should be there is fontpath.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
> I'm not a BSD user because developments like MacOS X make me uncomfortable. It's an ideological difference. I don't like the idea of someone modifying my code and not showing me what they did.
This is by far the most inane argument I have ever heard in terms of OS choice. Perhaps you prefer linux because of ReiserFS, or its support of your hardware, or perhaps another chooses BSD because they prefer its style of system management or toys like netgraph. Or Solaris for its scaleability, or HP/UX for its cluster capabilities. You have no technical reason at all, you even admit it's based on nothing but ideology. My god, I hope to never hire people like you.
And BTW, Darwin is open source.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
jeez, i used to be just like you. then i realized how nice a GUI file manager was for discontinuous operations, and how the two worlds desperately need to meet.
... so I need to search through the logs for files that were updated recently. Now I have a list of them in front of me. One by one I can click on them and review their history ... that change looks dubious, let's look at it in an editor. Okay, that's fine, next one. Whups, that one's messed, better revert it. Ok, next one. Whoah, I have no idea what that macro is, is that something from a new version? Todd would know, better mail it off to him ... send-to ... todd ... add a comment ... done.
scenario: I just got a whole bunch of new pages for a publication submitted from an author I'm soliciting work from for a book I'm publishing. This author is a complete wiz with the publishing app, and also submits templates for me to use for the book as a whole. So my secretary got his new chapters and templates, copied the whole shebang into the source folder and cvs committed it. I cvs update my copy, now one of his templates has a typo, whups it screwed up someone else's chapter. Or maybe it was my last change to the templates that screwed things up
I just did several different operations on a list of files that would have scrolled off my screen long ago on a CLI, or I would have had to open a new term and copy and paste into other command lines to do so. Yes, perhaps you could train me on new ways, new scripts, new tools to do things solely with the command line, but what I just did feels natural to me. There are some tasks I wouldn't dream of using the GUI for, and a great many tasks I am just too reluctant to use the CLI for.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
They also had to give up on NeWS, they were the biggest user of NeWS other than Sun, and in fact used it far better and cleanly merged GL into it.
However, BeOS isn't POSIX certified. While BeOS does have hooks in it (from the software's point of view) to be multi-user, it always has one user. If you look at the file permissions and all that, there is a user called "Baron" and a user group. However, they don't really have any effect other than allowing POSIX software (such as CVS, which reads the username) to function properly. The OS itself isn't multi-user, it justs pretends that it is for POSIX software. However, there was some talk about making it multi user, and the API is already ready for it (for example the find_directory call has constants for the particular user folders and common folders) but it would be a lot of work, and I don't really see a benifet right now.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I was talking about the tests from 0.9-4, before Linux's Detonator 3 drivers. However, Linux DOES still lose in hi-res tests, but a good margin sometimes. For example, 37fps in 16x12 is marginal, while 46 is quite playable. However, its a moot point. Even at 640x480, Linux is SLOWER than Windows. That's simply should not be the case. (Especially since NT4 has even faster OpenGL performance than Win2K)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...