Slashdot Mirror
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.
One is tempted to make the correlation:
:-) But ya gotta know what to pull the life support....
Amiga == OS2 == BeOS.
All ahead of their time technologically. All killed by stupid managment decisions. All still have freaks that refuse to acknowledge their death.
Oh, and I've used and loved all three
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
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/
Remember that Linux has only gotten really good and has gained the kind of acceptance it needs to be taken serious in the eyes of application developers in the last few years.
I would love to see an openBe implimentation, because it would be really nice to have an opensource OS geard toward multimedia instead of networking and programming. (Linux is many wonderful things, but it simply not geared for multimedia.)
It would take at least the same amount of time to reach 'critical mass'.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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
I've used and love BeOS. I've also used tons of other OSs. I've loved things about all of them. with the exception of Windows almost all of those other systems have been considered niche. Some of those niche OSs have thrived. I'd love to see some air breathed into Be again.
-
Debian for ex-BeOS users.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
>>I mean, the whole world seems to be holding its breath for the death of X11/freeX86.
Slashdot seems to be in an anti-X mood today. The truth is that the whole world is not waiting for the death of X11.
Xfree86 does have some configuration problems where it's still a pain to set it up. (The definition of painful is that I have to set it up period. With the kernel I can just apt-get install it, but with X I have to dpkg-reconfigure it.)
But X is not going away any time soon. The reason for that is not network transparency as some people argue. The reason is backwards compatability.
In fact, X doesn't really NEED to go away. Over the last few years the XFree86 developers have made tremendous progress in improving X and adding important extensions to the protocol.
To say that X is slow is really a lie. X is slow if you don't have one of the 5 accelerated graphics cards. Otherwise it's fine. (btw, I think you'll find that replacements to X have just as hard a time getting hardware specs as the Xfree86 guys do so creating a new window system doesn't help here)
X can be improved. And it's getting improved... But it's going to take time.
Anyways... I didn't mean to rant. I have to go because today is a great day to not be in front of a computer.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux / UNIX. I'm typing this from a FreeBSD workstation right now. I personally love the windowmaker environment and the "UNIX way". I don't believe in wordprocessors (long live LaTeX---or LyX for you neophytes). I read my e-mail with mutt. I use lynx to browse the web most often. I use X to organize my terminals and set their geometry!!!
That all being said, I would not wish my computing lifestyle on anyone.
I'm also a closet BeOS user when I can be. Let me tell you what I like about BeOS.
Some of the other things that be had was a file system that you could do many database style things to. Ripping and organizing mp3s from the standard filesystem and OS features was cake!
Replicants and such were badass. I could imbed a webpage on my desktop with netpositive.
I could go on and on. I loved the system. I love Linux. I love them for vastly different reasons.
I love my Linux brethren because of their idealism, but sometimes they are too interested in ruling the world by exclusionary tactics. Don't assume that alternative OS users', their hacking ability and intellect belong to "the movement".
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
It is X appologists like you that are keeping Linux away from the mainstream desktop.
X sucks. Period.
If you think otherwise perhaps you have just grown "accustomed" to it.
I have used X with just about every combo of X server/window manager/graphics card and it just doesn't cut it for a modern desktop. I hate to use it and I know it very well. Say what you will about Mac/BeOS/Windows etc but when it comes down to it... each of those desktops (not OS but desktop) kick the crap out of anything on Linux.
as long as the alleged source tree leak [begroovy.com] doesn't derail the project first.
As a precaution against legal liability, one of the more popular Beshare servers that hosted the tree, for however briefly, was voluntarily shut down.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Be Inc. had, for the most part, dropped BeOS entirely a year (at least) before Palm bought them.
They had been putting ALL of their efforts into the BeIA (I don't remember what the IA stands for) which was meant to be an "appliance OS", like PalmOS or Windows CE.
It was VERY cool, and used a lot of BeOS technology. BeIA is to BeOS what Windows CE is to Windows.
What else did BE own?
Operating system designers with incredible skills (Most of them originally came from Apple, of course). In this day and age intellectual capital is everything, and that's exactly what Palm is buying in Be - brainpower.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
BeOS was about latency, not throughput. When you move the mouse it moves NOW, not in a quarter of a second. Click on a button and it presses/releases IMMEDIATELY in response to what you did, and the new window snaps up NOW. It sucks as a router, but if having the GUI respond when you move it is what you think the system's first priority should be, then it's perfect.
Linux is about throughput and has sucky latency. Process switching is devoutly to be avoided. We won't put graphics in the kernel because that might slow down our packets per second as a router. We won't even apply the low-latency patches that have been floating around for a year and change. (Maybe in 2.5...)
Load a Linux box until it's thrashing and your rat pointer will jump inches at a time. You can't cut and paste text accurately when your mouse pointer jumps five letters a second and a half after you move it. That's how you get great throughput (batch up those transactions and run 'em through in CPU cache. Join together 50 mouse moves into one BIG mouse move!) But it sucks for GUI-ism, and that's what Windows users care about.
Moore's law will take care of half of this. As systems get faster, latency gets better because we deal with stuff as fast as it comes in. Nicing your X server down to -10 helps a bit, because it interrupts other tasks when it wants to do stuff, but that doesn't help applications you spawn and it doesn't do THAT much for the X server either because niceness is just a suggestion. Yet we don't even seem to do THAT as standard in Red Hat...
It's a question of what the system is optimized to DO. Getting good GUI performance from Linux has only been a goal for the past year and change. The KDE guys are trying it. The Gnome guys are trying to make sure the KDE guys aren't the ones to do it because they don't trust the KDE guys' judgement on licensing issues. The XFree86 guys are trying to undo the mistakes of the past 15 years. (That and get 3D acceleration, which is great, but 80 million triangles/second is reality (or the human perceptual threshold) and it won't be THAT long before Moore's law makes your low-end 3D card photorealistic images in realtime. And a hardware generation or three after that, software rendering will be able to do it. It becomes a much less interesting problem then...)
The kernel is fun, but the big block to Linux on the desktop isn't the kernel anymore. It's XFree86 and KDE. That's where effort can be used. But not until we understand the difference between latency and throughput. (Although getting the kernel to have seperate niceness settings for throughput and latency might be a good thing...)
Rob