Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Can BeOs Live On As Open Source?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the was-a-be-now-a-half-a-be dept.

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.

7 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. I Support an Open Source BeOS by The+Slashdolt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been an avid supporter of Be for years. I like the OS and have bought many versions. I think it would do well as open source for numerous reasons. The one that sticks out most in my mind is that it is truly an object oriented OS. I am an object oriented developer and I've looked through and attempted to write some code for linux, and I really didn't like it. BeOS on the other hand, is something I'd like to contribute to. I'm sure there are many other object oriented developers who feel the same way. Imagine if you could get the BeOS GUI to run on top of the linux kernel. What a product it could be!

    --
    mp3's are only for those with bad memories
    1. Re:I Support an Open Source BeOS by Lemur+catta · · Score: 2, Interesting
      if you could get the BeOS GUI to run on top of the linux kernel. What a product it could be!

      It would a dog.

      The things that made BeOS so great were its database-oriented filesystem, its pervasive multithreading, and the tight integration of multimedia into the OS. The BeOS GUI was clean and efficient, but no more or less so than most *nix window managers. What made it so desirable was the massive multimedia performance that was built into the core of the OS.

      BeOS running over the Linux kernel would perform about as well as BeOS running under a virtual machine; you'd lose all that great low-level performance that stemmed from the tight hardware integration and optimization.

      If you want the BeOS GUI, download one of the many BeOS themes available for $FAVORITE_WM. The end-user experience will be about the same as the "real" BeOS GUI on top of the Linux Kernel would be.

  2. Niche OS by Bouncings · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think this shows are hard it is to have a niche OS market. Aside from wireless and imbedded technologies, it seems to me very unlikely that something as huge as an OS can exist on what basicly amounts to a niche. Where there are so many layers to an OS, adopting a whole new set of standards just to have a multi-media optimized OS just wasn't realistic.

    That's what's so wonderful about distributions. You can make a niche distribution without the overhead of Yet Another EVERYTHING.

    --
    -- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
  3. Can BeOs Live On As Open Source? by Adnans · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nope. As has been stated over and over again, BeOS cannot and will not be relicensed as Open Source software. There is simply too much proprietary, third party, technology embedded in it that it would take a lot of time, and probably a lot of cash, to strip away. It took SGI almost a year, if not longer, to get XFS released as GPL. Okay, the had to reengineer a good deal of the Linux kernel too. Besides, even if Be manages to strip out the proprietary bits you will most likely be left with a shell of code that will not compile, for a significant amount of time (*cough* Mozilla *cough*).

    And IMHO, the "coolest" bits of BeOS have already made it into Linux -> 64-bit journalling FS with attributes, XFS! The other cool BeOS buzzword "pervasive-multithreading" didn't turn out to be that cool after all.

    -adnans (ex-BeOS fool)

    --
    "In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
  4. Another Alternative for BeOS Users: by idonotexist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Debian for ex-BeOS users.

    --
    "There ought to be limits to freedom"
  5. Re:Why not contribute to GNOME/KDE? by anonymous+cowpie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For a while, Pavel Cisler, the creator of the BeOS Tracker (BeOS' graphical shell) was employed at Eazel. If you are familiar with both systems, his influence in Nautilus is apparent.

  6. Re:de average person doesnt giv a fuck about secur by Mandelbrute · · Score: 2, Interesting
    They want stability, simplicity, reliabilty & compatibilty. That's it. (unless of course they are into things pedaphilic, or they are a drug dealers, or they take work home with them, or they are paranoid schizos)
    Personally, I close the door and draw the curtains when I take a shower.

    I let anyone who visits my house (invited by anyone that lives in my house) use my PC (I can't stop them if I'm not there), but I don't want them to have the ability to send emails out in my name, read any file or change any file on the system. There's login passwords to ISP's in plain text in there, and technical reports that should remain confidention, plus lots of role playing stuff that could be taken out of context (not to mention a lot of fantasy art that may make people think I have a thing for tall women wearing little strips of leather and carrying 7 foot long swords).

    In the office security is essential, if only to stop pranksters or the disgruntled from changing your files and settings. In the home at least you want to be able to stop people from assuming your identity (or your new girlfriend reading five years of your email outbox and saying tearfully "why didn't you write letters like that to me?").

    Back to BeOS - how much effort would it really take to enable SSL and have a secure login screen? I suspect that it wouldn't take a lot to make everthing that comes in either authenticate itself or not be able to do anything outside of the program that asks for the data. As for file permissions, I don't know much about BeOS, but I know that it can support a few different filesystems, so it becomes a case of using one that supports file permissions.

    The audio geeks love BeOS for it's low latency.

    The multimedia geeks love it for the applications.

    The proto-geeks love it for it's ease of use and stability.

    It would be very bad to see Palm let it die. BeOS doesn't fit in the organiser market, but tiny PC's like the iPac are a growing market, and BeOS could fit squarely into the market of organiser sized PCs if Palm goes that way.