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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 ..."
Now you may not have liked those decisions, but as a group, that's where Open Source went.
Whoa, slow down there, cowboy.
The licenses which make OSS possible are there to do just that -- force people and organizations to stay honest and not simply take advantage of the efforts of others. What you can *do* with that software is pretty much unfettered -- consider all of the places you can find Linux in one form or another.
Besides that, who said we (we as in the community) had decided to compete against Microsoft? Competition implies that the OSS community is tied up in a parry-and-jab with MS, which we most definately are not -- why else would we be so eager to interoperate with Windows boxen, even when it means trying to adhere to MS's broken "standards"?
OSS is about a way to develop software, and nothing else. My personal interest, and I dare say the interest of most people involved in the development or use of OSS, is only to obtain and use the best possible software solution for our needs.
Raising the awareness of the project is important, but generally good and useful software concepts attract users and developers far more effectively tan "marketing".
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Given that BE is relatively new, and as yet (I would assume) under-developed, what would be the challenges in getting it to work natively using windows drivers? In other words, why re-write every driver for every peice of hardware, when one could change the OS once instead?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
My point is that marketing goes far beyond buying ads and doing press releases. That's simply advertising.
So yes, if the people doing the coding want people to actually run their code, they should take it upon themselves to do some evangelizing. If there's not a groundswell of support, then distros will never pick up the code and do the advertising work that follows.
Umm... no. Try to be a little more informed when you write, AC. OpenBeOS is based on a kernel from NewOS which was written by one of the ex BeOS coders. There are several BeOS clones based on Linux (Blue-Eyed OS, Leonardo, even Cosmoe to some extent) but OpenBeOS is something different. The underlying architecture that made BeOS good for audio/video will not only still be there but be improved upon.
Please read the linked content. If you do you'll find Mike makes reference to companies and organizations expressing a commercial interest in OpenBeOS. What we have here is truly unique: An operating system built from the ground up that isn't directly tied to "old" technology. I don't mean to say that old technology isn't important. Indeed it is, because it's proven. But one must recognize that a platform which is no older than five years, that's public, which works on many hardware configurations, and still has the best media management (yes, BeOS under proper configuration and on decent hardware [my SCSI setup being one of them] is better for multimedia than apple systems). It has a place and my question in the article was rhetorical really. A lot of today's self-described linux advocates are advocates of just that; linux!
People don't seem to want to be bothered with supporting truly open source software. This is just an indicator of such a person's own cynicism regarding the potential success of open source. I acted under no direction of the OBOS team. They're right, it's not their job to market, but whoever wants to get the word out is welcome and that's exactly what I did. Now come on, read about what we're doing. Try to understand where we're coming from and where we're going before you judge us from an article, the length of which just barely constitutes a paragraph. I'm sure that if you looked into OpenBeOS, while it might not be the OS for you, you'll agree it has its place. Sorry to bother your slashdotting with this plea for sincere consideration, I'll go back to work now...
>In my experience, you just can't hide the under-the-hood stuff
What about MacOS X?
Anyway, I guess it would be a good idea to put BeOS (the UI that is) on top of GNU/Linux. But who am I to tell anyone what to do?
is there any news at all on what Palm will do with BeOS?
i wonder how much BeOS will influence the PalmOS.
i seems a shame that such a good OS should die like this. i applaud OpenBeOS for their work at "reviving" what once was, even if it is stil linux.
I want 2D games back.
Michael Phipps gave an interesting answer to the "Why openbeos?"-question in the Q&A-session:
[Captcpu] Here's a nice one from: [mwilber] Why did you decide to start the OpenBeOS project? ;-) :)
[17:35:47] [mphipps] Insanity.
[17:36:25] [Captcpu] good answer
[17:36:52] [Captcpu] but wait..there's more...[mphipps] Seriously - I had a project that I have been working on for years on BeOS. The short version of the story is that it is an object oriented paradigm in which every class is a process and every instance is a thread. It needs hyper fast messaging and process/thread swapping. No other OS will do that. Even R5 wasn't the best.
[17:37:47] [mphipps] So, when the Palm announcement was made, I looked at Linux and the BSD's, but none of them were as fast and as easy to use. So I decided that BeOS must continue on.
Hopefully more people will see things the same way. Some things are hard to do, or outright impossible in most common enviroments today. If enough people makes this realization OBOS could have a very nice thing going.
Another thing that often is forgotten when talking about OBOS is that the goal is not only to recreate BeOS as OSS. It goes beyond that. The goal of OBOS R1 is to recreate BeOS R5, but when the devlopment continues towards OBOS r2, new interresting stuff is going to be implemented. The plans of what to include in the post-r1-releases of OBOS are made at the Glass Elevator mailing list
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
It is possible that developing BeOS may be the most efficient use of resources for getting a user-friendly desktop onto Linux. If you strip out X and the BeOS GUI, I believe what is left is pretty much identical, and lots of people think the solution for fixing Linux on the desktop is to get rid of X.
A serious question here: why does anyone "need" to learn about alternate OS'es?
/.'er - just throw out a few neat acronyms, flame some other OS, and claim to be the latest-and-greatest-but-still-in-development. But that may only impress 10% of the market.
I ask because in order to get this message across you need to use an argument that has more meaning than "stopping the MS hegemony" or to "create choice". There needs to be a reason than people can actually personally relate to, such as "because we have the best quilting design software" or "because we provide the easiest-to-configure internet access".
It's easy to convince as
What about the other 90% who just want the damn thing to work most of the time without too much hassle? What do you offer them?
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
People seem to forget that although BeOS was ultra-great, it was designed under commercial pressures. They had to have a product that worked soon, and that limited them. We can do so much better. Here are some blue sky ideas for my "dream" OS:
I mean really, we should not limit ourselves to merely small steps. Linux will do for now, but eventually we will need to move things forward, completely free of the past. Why not?