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

Hrrmm....

[Teancom]

One is tempted to make the correlation:

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 :-) But ya gotta know what to pull the life support....

Niche OS

[Bouncings]

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.

OpenBe's time would be a few years down the line..

[Bonker]

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'.

Can BeOs Live On As Open Source?

[Adnans]

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)

BeOS != Linux

[pschmied]

I'm beginning to wonder about all "All you BeOS users should come join / extend Linux." There is a reason that BeOS users used Be. I don't even understand this reasoning. The user experience with Be was so vastly different from Linux that I don't even know where to start.

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.

1. Never once have I compiled a kernel
2. I rarely have had to dick around installing software. I installed video lan client for DVD and it worked immediately. I've still yet to figure it out in X. Yes, I'm stupid.
3. You may have heard it before, but BeOS is FAST. Really. My computer takes more time in the bios screen than it does booting the OS.
4. The user interface was marginally attractive (nothing is as sexy as NeXT), but more importantly it was consistant...everywhere. This is not to be underestimated. GTK and QT and XForms apps sit and mock me constantly when I have to use them. Yes, I've set their theme to NeXT. I still know which widget set everything uses.
5. BeOS didn't try to be everything to everyone, but came damn close. It wasn't just a multimedia OS. Whoever said BeOS was never made for wordprocessing never used Gobe. For me it even had TeX.
6. 
   
   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