Can BeOs Live On As Open Source?

OSBlue writes: "After Palm announced the buyout of Be, Inc.'s intellectual property & Technology and after some consequent indications from several key people that Palm has no interest at Be's products and especially in BeOS, a number of the BeOS believers tried to find a new home. Some found comfort in AtheOS, others joined BeUnited's effort to license the BeOS source code, while some developers formed efforts like BlueOS and OpenBeOS. OpenBeOS consists from a number of BeOS developers who are trying to recreate the BeOS Kits in a form of a new, complete and open source Operating System that has source and if possible binary compatibility with BeOS 5. One of the most important people in this effort, Michael Phipps, is interviewed by OSNews.

Comments

BlueOS

[anpe]

From BlueOS page :

BlueOS will be based on a Linux kernel (not on a distribution) and a basic XFree86 (XWindow system)

Linux and X ?
Is it a good way to start a Desktop OS ?

Re:Hrrmm....

[DGolden]

Scarily, the Amiga OS has been open-source cloned and ported to x86, in the form of AROS.

Unlike other projects that have drawn some inspiration from AmigaOS, AROS pretty much just tries to be a straight clone (with a necessary overhaul to the device drivers layer).

The project is quite far along, and has a few interesting features:

(a) Amiga OS had no true memory protection. Neither does AROS. There's a system of semaphore locking on some sections that is to true memory protection as cooperative multitasking is to pre-emptive.

(b) When the system goes down (see (a)), it reboots in a fraction of a second - a soft "reboot" does not jump back to the BIOS, but re-enters the AROS kernel init after zeroing some choice areas of memory.

(c) due to the absence of memory protection between user-space tasks, context switches, such as they are, are extremely lightweight. Not much of distinction between threads and processes. Amiga applications have always tended to be very muyltithreaded. The OS is true pre-emptive multitasking.

(c) It uses message-passing-by-reference for IPC. Rather than copying data from one process to another, they pass references to the data around. Very quick.

(d) it has support for amiga-style logical volumes, assigns, and pluggable filesystem drivers, which are pretty cool - cd'ing into compressed archives, ftp sites, and so on, as well as the OS having a clear notion of the distinction between a particular floppy/cd/partition and the drive it is in... (woirked example: why the hell don't linux distros configure cdroms to automount and show up as both /mnt/cdrom and /mnt/cdlabel/ or something - the amiga got this right, allowing you to say "CD0:path/to/file" for "the file on thedisk that I've got in the CD drive" and "LABELNAME:path/to/file" for "the file on the particular volume that is named "LABELNAME", wherever it may be!)