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 ..."

Comments

BEos

[wastedbrains]

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.

Return of the Batmobile

[Skyshadow]

Now if we could just get people to stop buying station wagons and stick to either tanks or batmobiles, we'd be in business.

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.

The "Is there a market?" question

[TheGreenLantern]

"We are an OSS project. Marketing is not our job."

Translation: "No."

Re:If you don't think marketing is your job...

[Skyshadow]

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.

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".

Does one size really fit all?

[Skyshadow]

Isn't it possible that pushing Linux to the average user's desktop is like pushing a round peg into a square hole?

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?

Re:WhoOS?

[dinivin]

That kind of attitude certainly isn't going to get your OS on any desktops, and pretty soon you won't have any job.

Except that none of these developers are working on OpenBeOS as their job. They are working on it because they like it, and that probably won't change even if no one uses the it.

Dinivin

Re:Define 'marketing'

[DeltaSigma]

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...

Re:Corporate backing?

[WowTIP]

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