Slashdot Mirror
OpenBeOs Developers Talk About Progress
DeltaSigma writes: "Michael Phipps, of the OpenBeos team, recently hosted a public Q&A Session where many of the public musings over a completely new open source operating system have been addressed. The answer to all the 'is there room in the market?' questions was answered in a way: 'We are an OSS project. Marketing is not our job.' Perhaps more /.ers could keep this in mind ..."
...but there's room on my hard drive.
Alas, Babylon.
This is an operating system that hsould be developed even if there isn't "room" in the market for a new OS. Because as it progresses there will be room. As the OS becomes more usable people will make an effort to use it. Linux is a great windows alternative but starting completely over and not building off anything else is something that should really be done with most technology every so often. There is so much progress made in computer science why should we still be building off old systems and code. Build anew and you get a faster sleeker more efficient more reliable OS. This is great news even if it might take 6 years before it has the functionality of current OSes that are offered.
Dan Mayer: my blog, essays, art, etc
Seriously, though, I think right now is a key turning point in the platform wars. Simply put: thanks to widely-available and cheap networking and a proliferation of cross-platform applications (even on the desktop, at least until MS decides to pull the plug on Apple), the platform you're running on means less now than ever. That's the point Apple's trying to make in their new advertising campaign. Given that, it might just be that there's room for an OSS desktop.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"Marketing is not our job"?
Well, that's his perogative, but not necessarily one that will lead to a successful project.
What's the goal of this project? To create a new open source OS that no one uses? If so, marketing is definitely not their job.
But if one of the goals is to create a new open source OS with a strong, active base of users and developers, then marketing MUST be part of the job and project plan.
Marketing goes far beyond advertising for the sake of increasing revenue. Marketing is all of the PR work you do with the development community, IT decision-makers, not to mention the media (including Slashdot).
Too often, open source advocates only associate marketing with profit-making companies, while forgetting that non-profits have marketing people too.
From museums to charitable foundations, the most successful ones are those that can successfully market their 'product' to the world. Open source software is no different.
OSS has grown up in many ways. Because of this, it's time we stopped acting like children and took responsibility. As a group, we decided to adopt restrictive licenses in order to prevent our creations from being used in a manner we did not approve of and we decided that we actually cared who adopted our operating systems, our programs, and we decided that we were going to compete against organizations like Microsoft.
Now you may not have liked those decisions, but as a group, that's where Open Source went.
Down that path lies marketing (including FUD, which we seem to have adopted quite easily), profit (which we still claim to want, even if we debate how it's actually obtained under this model.), and responsibilty (since we presume people will use this O/S to do business.)
If you don't want to take the responsibilty to handle the tasks that aren't fun (such as marketing), please don't complain in a few years that the project died of lack of support and adoption.
No Zen is good zen
With quotes like 'We are an OSS project. Marketing is not our job.' it's no wonder why 98% of the public have never heard of BeOS.
That kind of attitude certainly isn't going to get your OS on any desktops, and pretty soon you won't have any job.
**News Flash** Marketing works - especially if you have a solid product like BeOS was. Do you think MicroSoft and AOL would spend the wads of cash on marketing if it didn't work? Hell I'd be willing to guess that 40% or americans think that America(n) Online is the Internet.
While it may not be the developers' job to market BeOS, they need to be more aware that marketing plays an ever-increasing role in the success of any product - including Operating Systems.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
It seems to me that Linux is and always has been a server and power-user OS. It's become more user friendly in recent years, with the caveat that the ease of use depends heavily on the under-the-hood stuff operating correctly -- my mom will never, ever be able to tweak her kernel or reconfigure an XF86Config file.
Isn't is possible that an OSS-type BeOS is a better option? It provides an environment that is ground-up designed for desktop users. It can still give us all the Good Things that a OSS OS brings (compliance with standards, innate resistance to embrace-and-extend, etc). Why limit ourselves to only running over a specific kernel and using a specific (UN*X) basic paradigm?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Yes. concentrate on the code and ignore the bigger issues at hand. The express lane to success.
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
Umm...who the hell are you?
These people are not being 'put together' by anyone.
They will work on whatever project they want to.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
There is nothing to market. OpenBeOS is vaporware right now. There's very little done besides a lot of talk.
For instance: The kernel is a fork of the NewOS kernel, which is far from complete itself and there are few if any competant kernel hackers on the OBOS team. Also, fork has been changed so much (mostly superficial changes) by the few developers who are working on it, that changes to the NewOS kernel will not easily port to the OBOS fork.
Also, very little else of the OS has even been seriously started on. Check out the OpenBeOS website and see their progress indicators.
I'm not saying that the project will go nowhere (that's only my personal opinion), only that if it does it will be years before anything of significance is realized.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
This is why Open Source isnt taken seriously by many real companies -- many of the majorly hyped projects take this type of opinion towards marketing, "not our job". The fact is, it should be if you want your product to be used, open source or not.
Marketing does not need to mean advertising. I believe for Open Source projects, they need to use marketing as a way to define needs of the market (or the wants of the users), and goals of the project. As well as a way to present the product to the end user/customer.
How can you develop something for which you do not understand its requirements, nor its goals? Just because it is open source, and a voulenteer effort, does not mean its a good idea to attack the project blind from 2 sides!
That could mean it's vaporware, but past due? OpenBeOS hasn't made ANY release date promises, so how can it be past due and past a release date? They're recreating an entire OS from the ground up (and technicallly up to the ground). That's years of work. (Their goal is an R5 clone, so they have roughly seven years of work to do, I'm sure they'll move faster than that since they're not innovating it yet but you get the idea.)