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Peter Tattam Of The PetrOS Project Talks To OSNews
Eugenia writes: "Trumpet Software is mostly known for their Internet communications software package, Trumpet Winsock, which has been adopted by the Internet world back in 1995, at the times where Windows 3.1 and Win95 did not come as standard with full internet connetion capabilities. But the main product these days for Trumpet Software is PetrOS, a 32-bit Operating System, which has the goal to be compatible by all means (binary and API compatible) with Microsoft Windows. OSNews is interviewing the main architect behind the project, Peter Tattam, who talks in depth about PetrOS, and also there is shown an early screenshot of the PetrOS GUI, which is still under heavy development." And it's been (not surprizingly) under heavy development for a while. Building a Windows-compatible OS from scratch surely isn't easy, but from this interview (including screenshots) they're having quite a go of it.
I can't imagine why anyone would try to base a company on cloning Windows. So I read the interview.
A) Cheap alternative for desktop users -- users say "they wished they had something better without having to pay big big bucks." Win2k is, what, perhaps $200. PetrOS will have to sell for $50 or less, then.
And it'll be obsolete the moment MS changes an API. Or the moment MS makes MSIE crash when it detects PetrOS.
B) Embedded market -- er, no. The embedded market wants Linux, QNX, EPOC and other OSes. They're either free, hard realtime, or extremely small.
C) Servers -- er, no. If you want cheap, then you choose a BSD or Linux. If you want to be able to blame someone, you choose MS. You don't go out and buy some $50 clone of MS.
D) Clustering -- er, no. Not unless you're just goofing around. Kind of money invested in building a cluster, you don't go pick up a $50 clone of Windows to run it!
While this is a pretty cool project, I simply can't see that it's a profitable one...
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I can't decide if this is the work of a sincere person who is sadly deluded, or a marketing ploy to flog a few more dollars out of investors. It's hard enough getting your foot in the door with a pure desktop operating system that is better than Windows (BeOS, OS/2), much less one whose entire goal is to play catch-up to Windows itself. There is nothing here to appeal to people who already know and like Windows, and it's certainly not going to appeal to people who don't like windows either.
Beyond that, the technical feasibility of it is questionable. Microsoft is well known for making its Win32 API, filesystems, etc, moving targets. It's taken the Wine and NTFS teams a long time to get where they have, and even then they're pretty far from complete compatibility. What makes these guys think they're going to get any closer?
Oh well. I guess it goes to show you, there's always someone trying to ice skate uphill.
If you read the article, you would notice that they're using Borland's Object Pascal. Go ahead, everyone, read the Brian Kernighan article. Then go and look at the Object Pascal language reference. Go ahead...I'll wait.
Notice anything? Like how almost EVERY SINGLE objection he raised is NOT APPLICABLE to Object Pascal?
Object Pascal should be called "Sensible Pascal". It allows you to break all of the rules, just as C does. It just makes you jump through a few hoops to do it. That way you generally know what you're doing isn't such a great idea.
Pointer arithmetic? OP allows it. It's dangerous though...inexperienced programmers can blow themselves up pretty easily doing it. So...they make you do some castings to get around it. Good idea? Bad idea? Depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
I'm sure all the hard-core hackers here will laugh and snort and generally dismiss anything I say about OP, but those people aren't who OP is aimed it.
OP is aimed at programmers who WANT strong type checking and WANT the safety net the Pascal language provides and WANT a language that allows rapid object-oriented development in a language that is easy to read and understand.
C lends itself to fast, loose code, but is hard to learn and tends to be rather terse to read. It's definately not for learnin'!
OP allows the newbie to step in and test the waters with simple language specific things. However, as you become more comfortable with the language, you can EASILY do just about everything C allows you to do.
The learning curve is a gentle slope, and doesn't have any unexpected drop-offs where the language fails you.
Anyone that dismisses OP out of hand hasn't used it. Anyone that has used a recent OP doesn't use C anymore if they can help it.
This may be true to an extent, but if it were always true, then everytime there was a new version of Windows, notepad.exe would have to be recompiled!
If they stick with providing compatibility for the core Win32API they have a good chance of being able to run most of the programs that are written to run on multiple MS OSes in the first place. Examples are IE, Office, and most of the Windows Accessories and Games that MS doesn't recompile to use new features everytime the API changes.
I question their decision to leave out driver compatibility. In my opinion, that is key to gaining acceptance of a clone OS.