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SkyOS GUI Contest
SillyClown writes "Just saw this on OSNews.com. SkyOS (an alternative OS) is having a contest to replace their user interface. There are 30 or so designs, and the polls are open for voting. Check it out, help shape the future of SkyOS!"
I'll be honest. I'm impressed with the amount of work already put in there. I wonder if ELF/COFF support means such binaries can be run if all those calls are supported in SkyOS.
Now I just hate to see yet another OS that attempts to replace BeOS out there... so SkyOS will have to have an extremely simple programming interface, hopefully all in ANSI C 99, and not too much graphical overhead (as in KDE and GNOME), and most importantly, a COMPLETE support of OpenGL 1.4 and soon OpenGL 2.0.
I've always wondered if it was possible to create a BeOS lookalike OS that can use the drivers source code from the linux kernel (or X11) to be able to fully use all those network adapters and graphic cards.That will give that OS a huge lead in development of drivers which is usually the stumbling block against many new OSes.
If SkyOS REALLY has a tiny footprint, complete hardware-backed OpenGL support and drivers for as many hardware as is supported in say OpenBSD and has apps like QT, SDL, mozilla, perl, MPlayer, xmms, svgalib etc, I think this OS has a real chance. I just think the BeOS niche is open for any OS for the taking, which can shed the enormous overhead involved in running for example Linux + X11 + graphics binary drivers + Mesa + qt + gtk+ + KDE. At least some developers appreciate the relative simplicity BeOS had and will develop for such an OS if free.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Holy smokes, you should go pick up a copy of microsoft Bob. It sounds like it was made just for you. Seriously. The whole 'desktop' taken literally was a big part of it.... also a huge reason why it failed. A computer is not a desktop, regardless of the name. Its inconvenient to force that type of worksapce onto your PC.
- It's anarchy baby. Suck it up.
That in and of itself is not a bad thing. Windows 95 was actually pretty nice in a lot of ways. DLL Hell and its instability made it a pain. Fix those issues, and Linux might never have taken off like it did...
Since Windows XP (and Longhorn) have moved away from the classic Win95 interface, why chuck it? Unless you just want a unique interface to establish SkyOs's identity. But hell, keep what works. The familiarity would attract a lot of users.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The freedom of a developer to charge for code is as much a freedom as the consumer's freedom to not buy code or the open source developer's freedom to give away their code. Bill Gates has every right to charge for XP(much as we might wish otherwise:), just as I have every right not to buy it. But if you take the decision to charge for code then you have to have a piece of code that is worth charging money for, or perhaps in some cases something that people are prepared to pay money for.
If they intend to make money from a closed source OS then I suspect they will be sorely disappointed. This OS looks quite nice but since it offers nothing that cant be found anywhere else where can it go? If I want to pay for an OS I'll go for one with application support, even if the one without only costs ten euros, and since there are free offerings out there that offer all this and more why should I want to pay in the first place?
Which leaves them with a few ten euro CD replication fees. Not much for that much work, is it? Surely an open source model would result in a distribution with far more value, with useful applications like OpenOffice.org which they could shift a load more of and quite legitimately get away with charging a bit more than 10 euros for CD copies.
However I could be missing a point and being unfair on the developer. Perhaps they do not view it as a revenue stream, instead using it to gain some other advantage. Since I write open software as much for the CV candy as the philanthropy (hey, you have to eat!) I can see why someone might do that.
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