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. "

Comments

Kristian Van Der Vliet

[GMontag]

With all those syllables, this sounds like a good fit.

Phew

[HopeUnknown]

I saw the name "Kristian", and for a second there I thought they were talking about a girl! On Slashdot!

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Commodity Hardware

[kalidasa]

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?

Sounds cool, but...

[the morgawr]

So we have yet another hobby OS with some very good ideas that will never end up going mainstream. After checking the site out, nothing they're doing couldn't be done on top of a BSD or Linux based kernel (with modification ofcourse). This would have solved their hardware problems, and given them a fully working OS to start from, progams and all.

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.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[kalidasa]

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.

So in other words, Linus working on his own operating system kernel was just taking good developers away from HURD, right?

If we follow your logic, we'll be stuck with Linux and BSD forever. Not that Linux and BSD aren't great, but they are not perfect, and at some point "making them better" won't be enough anymore. You need to have constant experimentation with OSes or you'll never know what's possible (and you'll never replace all those OS programmers with a new generation).

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[powerlinekid]

Fair enough.
Well I am one of the developers from Syllable (Syllable-Net team leader to be exact) so maybe I can answer your question.

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!

Have you ever played with the linux internals? Or hacked on X or KDE? If you have, you know its a mess. Syllable is a consistent system built on modern ideas. We don't have 20 years of cruft to fight with everytime we need to make a change or add a feature. This alone is worth the effort.

Now most importantly: Our main developers code on Syllable because its fun. I have a blast throwing ideas back and forth between Vanders, Rick, Kaj, and all the others. If someone has a problem with some specific widget (recently the tab issue in our terminal), we work together to fix it. I don't think any of us are working on this to get rich. For the most part its also the whole "scratch an itch" philosophy. Just because we work on this OS, doesn't mean we'd work on another one. Thats like saying that just because I pirated a copy of Windows that I cost MS $200 because I would of bought it anyway. The world doesn't work like that.

We have a great community, a great project manager in Vanders and great developers. All of us keep our eyes on the user's needs, not on what we as developers want. As time goes on and more infrastructure is laid down, you'll see Syllable become more mature. Simple things that can be a hassle on Linux (gui consistancy, simple application notification through a central Registra, etc) will be in place.

Anyway, don't give up on Syllable yet. In the future it will be much different from Linux, BSD, Windows or anything else. Remember we're not even a year old yet (although AtheOS has been around for a while).

Re:AtheOS is dead?

[d-Orb]

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?

Yes, the same. The main developer stopped working on the project (at least, stopped posting to mailing-lists and the such), and after some time, people decided to fork Atheos to make syllable. It seems most of the former atheos community has moved over to Syllable. Another similar project used the Linux kernel with a BeOS like interface on top, this is Cosmoe. I am not familiar with the latter, though.

How do you maintain order and good design?

[Nicolai Haehnle]

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?

Re:Testing, testing, testing

[Vanders]

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.

Re:Hmm.

[DrWhizBang]

Syllables featureset is not express in terms of what it can do, but what it will do ;-)

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 ./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.

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.)