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Syllable's Kristian Van Der Vliet Interview

Posted by Hemos on from the write-your-own dept.

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. "

5 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Phew by HopeUnknown · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Commodity Hardware by kalidasa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  3. Sounds cool, but... by the+morgawr · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
    1. Re:Sounds cool, but... by kalidasa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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).

  4. Re:AtheOS is dead? by d-Orb · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.