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Syllable's Kristian Van Der Vliet Interview
Andreas Louca writes "OSNews.com has a nice interview with Syllable's Project Leader, Kristian Van Der Vliet. Syllable is one of the teams that raised off the ashes of AtheOS. They talk about the future of Syllable and the current status. "
With all those syllables, this sounds like a good fit.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
No, really. I must have missed this. What happened to AtheOS? When did it die? Why? When was this?
Wasn't AtheOS the OS that was all being done by that one guy and had the amiga-like GUI with the nice c++ API? If that's the one i'm thinking of, is this a big mark against the single-benevolent-dictator software development model that AtheOS was the shining example of, or a mark for because the project got so far before the guy wandered off for whatever reason?
Well, at the least, this explains why I suddenly stopped hearing about AtheOS after so much noise was made about it..
Does AtheOS's previous developer still use it on his home machine?
-super ugly ultraman
I saw the name "Kristian", and for a second there I thought they were talking about a girl! On Slashdot!
A nitpick:
This OS looks really cool, but I just want to know: years and years since LiteStep or AfterStep or Windowmaker or whatever the first attempt to make "a NextStep-like window manager", and the "open source community" still can't seem to produce a GUI that doesn't look exactly like a less-stylish version of NeXTStep.
I guess that isn't *bad*.. it's just funny.
Besides this, though.. I am firmly convinced that "open source" is going to go nowhere until the Community realizes that everyone except you absolutely HATES the way that Motif looks. No, saying "it has skins" is *never* an acceptable answer. If your product, out of the box, has that faux-3D, Motif/NextStep/Netscape 4 look to it *anywhere*, people will not want to use it.
The most interesting part to the interview is where he starts talking about the difficulty in coding for modern hardware interfaces; he suggests that as easier-to-code interfaces like PS/2 and the floppy are rplaced with harder-to-code interfaces like USB, the end of the hobby OS may be at hand. As the barrier-to-entry for coding OSes for commodity hardware grows larger, doesn't that suggest that the opportunity for new robust OSes to evolve to compete with the established players (not only Windows, but OS X, the other BSDs, and Linux) may not exist in the future? Is it possible that the evolution of the OS may be choked by the evolution of the hardware?
For Open Source and Free Software to succeed people need to stop making "yet another peice of software written from scratch". The strength of having the source is that you can modify it for your own use (like syllable is doing with the GNU tool chain) and not have to re-invent the wheel. The argument of "what's out there isn't good enough" doesn't fly either. You have the source to fix it and make it better!
While this seems like a cool project, it is taking away developers who could be adding the same great features and abilities to our current systems. Then again, maybe I don't understand what they are trying to do.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
I've been lurking on the AtheOS/Syllable mailing lists for a long time now. For a time I had the feeling that, given enough time, Syllable could really become a great operating system, because people were thinking in terms of clean design, looking at the big picture.
In the last few days, there has been an explosion of activity on the mailing list, and maybe it's just my pessimistic self, but I think the focus has shifted away from clean design to features. If this trend continues, and Syllable falls victim to featuritis and coding without the big picture in mind, it'll simply end up as yet another operating system.
Do you agree that this is a problem? If so, do you think it will be possible to keep this trend in check or even reverse it?
Why, then, is Syllable an ugly looking, instable OS?
Because Syllable is a development, alpha version. Ugly can and will be fixed in time. We inherited the GUI from AtheOS and thats how it looks. Why spend time and effort changing the look of the GUI when the GUI isn't complete?
Instability is inherent in the development process. Yes, we are very poor at testing before release, but that is because it is alpha quality. I don't have a release schedule, and there certainly are not enough users to form a FreeBSD style release team.
Release testing generally consists of me trying out common actions for about half an hour after a build. As we finalise and stablise API's we can build automated test harnesses and formalise a testing plan for new releases.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Syllables featureset is not express in terms of what it can do, but what it will do ;-)
./configure, make, make install), Syllable will be most powerful when native apps are written using the fs api's to store/index data, etc. It should compare more to beos and macos x than linux or qnx.
Syllable does not use X or the linux kernel - it uses it's own SMP and fully preemptable kernel, it's own 64 bit filesyste (with attributes). and it's own alpha-channal-aware display server. It uses a C++ API that is similar to beos. And it is completely free.
In the end, we expect syllable to be a os that is nice to work with - easy to use, easy to program. Since it does not use X as a display server, It provides its own toolkit. This will help applications maintain one look and feel. Although most posix apps can be ported (a la
There are other hobby OSes. Syllable just happens to be reasonably far along (thanks to Kurt Skauen) and seems to have a lot of momentum (thanks to Vanders.)
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
The Syllable API (And of course, the AtheOS API before that) was often compared to the BeOS API. It is not a clone and there are no plans to turn it into one, but it is certainly similiar. An application is built by deriving from a toolkit of C++ classes, which in turn talk to an application server.
So it is a lot like OpenBeOS in that respect, except that Syllable has much more development behind it and works now. We are also not trying to clone BeOS API by API; if it suits our purpose we can and will use something completely different (For example, BeOS had a user-space TCP stack. AtheOS and Syllable have always had a modular kernel space stack)
Syllable is also mostly under the [L]GPL, whereas OpenBeOS is MIT. Apart from the various idological reasons that don't interest me, Syllable can also draw on a large base of drivers available in E.g. Linux. Which is nice.
Syllable : It's an Operating System