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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.
It's an interesting goal and everything, but it's a moving target, as far as I can tell.
Every few months I get a new copy of the MSDN library (basically documentation for all Microsoft's APIs), and every time it's a bit different from the one before.
Of course I don't want to tell anyone how to spend their time, but if it were me, I'd spend my energy on building something new, rather than just trying to be compatible with something that'll just be obsolete by the time I'm done anyway.
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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.
Sure sounds like a good idea reading about it but it's totally unpractical. He wants to aim for the desktop, which means he's gonna have to go for the average user. Since windows comes "free" on all mainstream PCs today, the average user will never ever have the need to run a windows clone.
Sure, us geeky people will have fun messing around with it, but we already have our joys in running unixes.
486 DX processor.
2MB System RAM (4MB recommended).
At least 2MB Hard drive space. This struck me as funny. I understand the point they're trying to make, but does this mean I'd better go out and get that 2MB upgrade I've been looking at for the past ten years for the 486DX I intend to run this on?
"We're well aware of the dominance by the key player in this market - we just want to coexist, not supplant." - Peter Tattam
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it." - Jean-Louis Gassée
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
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.
The "secret APIs" are not a rumor. Notice the dates on these references, the secret APIs have been in NT all along.
MSFT hasn't hesitated to use the secret APIs either. From the July 10 InternetWeek: Microsoft has historically achieved market dominance by controlling APIs and forcing competitors to write software to Microsoft's APIs, then changing the APIs. "Instead of satisfying their own customers' demand, competitors are busy catching up with Microsoft," said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky.
From the October 8, 1998 NY Times: And Microsoft, the people added, did what it has always denied it does -- used access to its technology as a powerful lever in business negotiations, by offering Netscape preferential access to the Windows "application program interfaces," or A.P.I.'s, the links that enable other companies' programs to run smoothly on the Windows operating system. By turning down the deal, Netscape, they say, would not have that preferred access to Microsoft technology -- a threat that Microsoft fiercely denies making.
Think about it - can you, using only Win32, write all of the stuff that MSFT provides with NT/W2k? No. Clearly, MSFT keeps APIs to themselves. MSFT wants to allow itself the latitude to write faster, more functional programs than the ordinary developers can write. MSFT has proven time and time again that it will use secret APIs to its own advantage, or to the advantage of selected partners (Executive Software, for example). This practice is certainly bad for the consumer. Secret APIs raise the cost of entry into the NT system software market, which will keep out competitors, raise prices, and reduce choice.