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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 ..."
...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
Ummm, an IRC log is just a text file. You're probably viewing it in a Windows text editor, which would cause the line breaks not to translate properly. Try viewing the file in Wordpad, or better yet, VIM.
As an aside, just because everyone you know uses AIM doesn't necessary mean that the rest of the world does. The reason it's not posted in an AOL IM log format is because the Q&A took place on IRC, not on AOL.
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
If you have trouble reading the one linked off the front page, here's a mirror of the log in HTML.
http://www.kupoflux.com/tmp/beoslog.php
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I support spreading santorum
"We are an OSS project. Marketing is not our job."
Translation: "No."
It hurts when I pee.
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
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.
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.
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.
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In my experience, you just can't hide the under-the-hood stuff and assume the users will never need it -- remember the "zero administration" debacle?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
If your heart is in it and it brings you joy, then go ahead. Chances are others will see the love you put into the project and give it a try.
If not, you still learned a lot in the process and quite possibly added to the pool of knowledge and others will still benefit.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
how many home-ish users really need a multi-user system?
Anyone who shares their computer with family or friends on a regular basis. I myself enjoy a Mac OS X computer with separate accounts for each member of my family; they can create documents, download files, and so forth without stepping on each other's desktops or making major changes to the system (without my permission). My wife can litter the desktop with text documents, my kids can add their own browser bookmarks, they can download and rip whatever music they like -- it doesn't get in anyone else's way.
Really, multi-user systems might not have been all that important in the "old days" of personal computing. But now that a $699 off-the-shelf box and a cable modem is enough to become a vulnerable server on the Internet, multi-user setups are essential for basic security, with the added benefit of keeping everyone's virtual space personalized and distinct from everyone else's.
Be is dead and gone. Its assets were bought out by Palm earlier this year. BeOS died a horrible death along with the company and is now partially owned by Palm- who won't release it since it doesn't suit their business well. They bought it to get the development team who is now working on PalmOS.
This article is about OpenBeOS, which is currently vaporware. They don't even have a functional kernel yet. They've taken the NewOS kernel and badly maimed it... there aren't many competant kernel hackers on their team.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
1. Profiles are little more than eye-candy without permissions to enforce policy on said profiles. Without some sense of multiple users, one user cannot restrict read and/or write access from other users. Even home users have something to gain from little brother not being able to delete big sister's homework. Not to mention keeping users from deleting or changing key system files.
2. The multi-user paradigm allows services to run as other than "root." One of the big weaknesses of most home flavors of Windows is that a compromise in any program is a "root" level compromise. I feel much more confident knowing that if a back door happens to be in my irc client that my exposure is limited to my personal files. Losing data sucks. Having to reinstall the OS sucks worse.
Regards,
-l
>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"
I suppose in a world where people spend a lot of time writing PDP-10 and game console emulators, another nostaliga-driven software effort won't matter much. But just imagine if all that effort were directed towards doing something new and original: coming up with new kinds of user interaction, figuring out entirely new ways of organizing kernels, rethinking the way kernels are implemented.
If it has to be a clone of a system that has been done before, why not clone and create a better implementation of something that differs more from what we already have than BeOS?
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!
With MS basically looking to try and force people into XP, I've been wondering what I'm going to recommend to these people. OS-X is a definate possibility, but apple hardware is rather expensive. And I'm not exactly a huge fan of the way apple handles things either. They are not exactly a model company either.
Honestly, I've never gotten a chance to use BeOS. I really wanted to give it a whirl, but it went under before I got a chance. From what I saw though, I think it might fit into that space very well, if they can get enough apps. (Binary support for other free OS's would be good there. Not sure how feasible that is though in this case.)
Regardless, they aren't a company. They have no need to prove market or profitability. If they want to do it, that's all that really matters. There's no need to justify your itch before you can scratch it.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
You mean something like WinBe?
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
You're right! No middle ground! I hereby call for a boycott of OpenBeOS! While we're at it, let's boycott Sourceforge; there are clearly too many software projects there that aren't meant to compete directly with Microsoft products! All those projects born of niche necessity or pure personal enjoyment... all those programmers indulging in their hobbies... it makes me sick!
I hate to ask a question on /. that my be heresy or brilliance or both:
Simply put, BeOS was an excellent operating system, but OBOS may (or may not) fall under some of the axes that fell on BeOS.
Boot Loader: Acceptance by OEM's I take it is not a concern, but should be in the mind of the developers, just in case.
OSS: Attracting developers did not seem to be a problem, but because of the politics involved with some binary compatability with OSS, there were *drivers* for hardware that were rejected because BeOS was closed. (don't pshaw, that is why you could not get anything beyond a 3com 905 to work despite drivers being written...I ran into that problem)
Not a fun place to be, you know the OS and hardware will work, but the person who wrote it gets smacked down. Grrrr.
The "B" in BeOS/OBOS: perhaps the B shoud be for BSD, that way the above OSS conundrum does not present itself. Think about it: forks and usage of the source w/o giving back are welcomed and would avoid the "show your source or piss off" problem.
This, I think, would also round out the BSD family (Open/Net/Free) with a Multimedia (crus of BeOS) quite nicely if the developers did decide to use BSD. (and this coming from a Slackware, and slight Redhat, fan).
Interesting that I found myself getting excited, but after the first round of being wowed and then let down when Be dropped BeOS, well, "once bitten, twice shy..."
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Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
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.)
While Gene Kan's death is certainly tragic, he had nothing to do with OpenBeOS that I know of. He was never even listed on their website, he most certainly wasn't a founder, and I never heard of him once in connection with BeOS during the time I was involved with it (from Preview Release 2 in their pre-Intel days up through Be, Inc.'s demise). I can't remotely find anything that suggests otherwise.
The BeOS kernel was the source of BeOS's performance. The Linux kernel is a fine kernel for a platform based around making use of the software that was written for operating systems that came before Linux.
That does not mean that it would not be possible to build a varient of BeOS that runs with a Linux kernel, in fact there was an effort to build just such a platform. I have not heard a lot form them lately, which may be an indication of the people involved all being short of time, or possibly problems with the implementation of the vision.
On top of everything else, the developers made a decision to go the direction they took. That decision may not jive with your opinion, it may not even jive with documentable facts. However the decision has been made, and they are running with it.
If you really want to figure out why they made the choices they did, feel free to go to their web site and see if you can understand from that.
-Rusty
You never know...
Just to be picky: GeForce Ti 4600 = $300.00 or more. Windows XP corporate workstation $300.00. As you approach top of the line hardware, windows liscenses become a smaller fraction of the total cost. However, if you were to measure the cost of all software installed on a typical windows system it would likely dwarf the cost of the hardware. That statement may be less accurate for high-end Windows "advanced servers" like those pooped out by HP, Dell and IBM, but I do know the applications those servers usually run are priced in the thousands and ten-thousands (perhaps even hundred-thousands) of dollars (think Oracle or DB2 on a 16-node Windows 2000 advanced server with multiple TB SAN array).
Im sure that if the intent of the coders was, in fact, to produce an OS that could rival Microsoft, they probably would have teamed up with some of the already existing Linux projects. They could be helping with KDE, GNOME, or kernel dev. However, producing the M$ killer is obviously not their intent.
Or maybe producing an MS killer is their intent and they are just smart enough to realize that teaming up on some linux project is precisely not the way to do that..
Actually, in all reality, their goal is pretty simple and has been stated over and over, its to replicate beos r5 from scratch and eventually expand upon it.
Isn't is a pseudo-acronym? The OS made by Be is called BeOS, that seems reasonable. The Mac OS is called MacOS, ditto.
I know where it is done to mkae the name look funky, that's horrible, but wnat is the alternative? Beos and Macos? They loose meaning because it becomes less clear that they are the OS associated with Be and Mac, respectively.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
This article is about to roll off the front page, so I doubt anybody will read this, but I'll post it anyway.
I believe OBOS will fail, and it will be a shame. But it will fail because it is a large project managed like a commercial project, and people just aren't jumping on board.
When I gave up on Linux and decided it didn't have what it took to be a desktop OS, I went looking for something else to contribute my time to. OBOS seemed like the thing. An OS whose primary thrust was the desktop, not as a server!
However I quickly found that all the things that Linux did right in the early days (and still doing right today), OBOS is *not* doing. Take a look at their join us page. It looks and feels as though they are filtering applicants. It isn't like Linux where the source code is out there, easy to get, easy to hack, easy to submit a patch to the other developers and eventually have your fixes make it into the code. You don't come out of nowhere and submit something to OBOS, you Join up and hope they put you on to "that team".
Of course this is necessary because all these team members have CVS access and can create a nightmare for everybody else. If it was just anybody posting patches to a mailing list the problem would not exist.
Thus, sadly, OBOS is going to fail because the OBOS Powers That Be don't understand what Linux did right. As a result, nobody wants to go through the "commitment" of "joining" - especially now that they're talking about removing people who aren't contributing... Now joining carries an obligation... What if I just want to play around and hack a little and ask others to try my changes?
Sorry OpenBeOS... I *really* wanted you to work.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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