Slashdot Mirror
New SkyOS 5.0 Screenshots Released
Hexydes writes "After 3 months of waiting, the first round of screenshots showing off the new GUI for SkyOS 5.0 have been released. The three screenshots show various features of the new GUI, including the new WindUI theme, new Viewer window, and various window effects such as curves, shadows, and transparency.
In addition to the new GUI, SkyOS 5.0 will have other additions, such as more support for hardware (just to name one, an ATI driver to go alongside the NVidia driver), speed and stability improvements, anti-aliased text, and Bochs support."
It looks just like all other spinoffs where someone begins to write a cool GUI, and then it becomes a not so cool OS.
What am I missing if I run GNU/Linux, GNU/BSD or GNU/Cygwin/Windows?
If it's only the GUI I guess it can be implemented in XFree...
(GNU above is only to keep RMS happy...)
http://www.millnet.se/ GO/U d- s+:+ a C++ UL++++ P- L+++ E W+++ N+ w++ M-- PE+ t+ X++
I searched the web page pretty carefully, and found nothing at all on this topic! :'}
It looks like the shadow code needs some more work. Windows with rounded corners have that same square shadows as windows whose corners are not rounded.
Take one of the screenshots from the front page, for example. Look at the lower-right corner of the window with the clock, at the top of the screen. Doesn't look right.
Why the heck can't slashdot give site maintainers a heads up so that they can make sure the mirrors are online?????????????
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
OK, can anybody speak up for this? What's to like about it? Why's it cool? What's it got that I should drool over?
It looks pretty dated and derivative. It's also non-free. So - make me care...anybody?
Experience is a hard school, but fools will learn no other.
After talking to an ATI representative, they said that they were unwilling to donate a video card for us to use to implement our driver. This is unfortunate, as we have great support for NVidia's cards, but currently only support ATI's cards via VESA 2.0 mode.
If anyone has any ATI contacts, call them up and ask them to support the project with some hardware and any documents they can provide.
I bet there are a dozen ATI developers that read slashdot, why dont you guys/gals help out. Sometimes we can bypass all politics, lets see if someone out there can do it.
Yet another 23 year old implements an OS. I like that very cool squinting sideways glance on Robert, though, so maybe I should try his OS after all.
>> Why the heck can't slashdot give site maintainers a heads up so that they can make sure the mirrors are online?????????????
What, And deprive us geeks of the warm and fuzzy feeling we get when we behold the unstoppable power of a merciless slashdotting devastate yet another little corner of the internet?!
Especially when we consider ourselves a part of that power?
C'mon. You can't deprive millions of geeks of their ego trip!
Oh man, that's the funniest thing I've read all day!
Yeah, man, you sure wouldn't want SkyOS to go the way of Linux, and accidentally become wildly successful and widely used by people.
On the other hand, I'm sure development would be *much* slower if they didn't have all this open source code to ste^H^H^Hwork from in the first place...
Interestingly enough, Linus GPL'd Linux out of respect for GCC, a fact that these SkyOS people (and RMS) should probably consider.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It's been slashdotted very badly
num->num->pineapple
Why would I want to help a non-free OS get support? Can't the SkyOS team spend money on the parts they need to build their business (after all, they charge money for their system)? Can't they learn what they want to know from the XFree86 source code? That source code is licensed under terms that allows proprietary derivatives (unlike the GNU General Public License which SkyOS might be infringing). I'm reminded of what RMS said he told developers a while back about non-free Unix source code--(paraphrasing) AT&T is not a charity, don't donate your effort.
Sometimes people ignore real issues (like software freedom) to pretend they're irrelevant. Abiding by copyright law has serious consequences. If the SkyOS team is found liable for copyright infringement, they'll learn just how unwise it is to ignore politics.
Digital Citizen
Well somebody cares, cos the download speed for the 32MB package that I'm trying to pull down now sucks...
I don't think they were slashdotted; i think maybe they just suck
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
It's not you, it's me. I just don't have time for another OS in my life right now. I'm so sorry, really.
796F75617265616E65726400
bring about the emergence of a better desktop.
It is the continued use of conventional "monitors"
that needs to change.
Only then will we move into an age where the flow of
information is not tortured by misspellings and horrible grammer. One can dream, no?
Actually, I was referring to software freedom. However the proximity of the word "free" to a cost reference may have been misleading.
Using GNU GPL-covered programs (in the US) doesn't compel one to ship source code for the OS because merely executing a program is not an activity regulated by US copyright law. The page I pointed to referred to an "ES1371 driver from Linux" as being something copied from the Linux kernal into SkyOS. Including a driver from the Linux kernal would most likely not be fair use, so one would have triggered source code distribution.
And licensing under the GNU GPL has nothing to do with "open[ing]" programs source code. The GPL was written by the Free Software Foundation years before the term "Open Source" was coined.
A poster to the SkyOS forums ("Adam") says that:
If you want to verify that I'm citing Adam's claim correctly, you'd better read their archive of posts quickly; SkyOS' admins have already deleted some posts written by Adam (making it impossible to determine if they are editing out spam, silencing criticism, or something else).
Kelly (who appears to speak for SkyOS) erroneously believes that SkyOS' distributors has to distribute source code for a GPL-covered program (or a promise for the source code to this program) only if they distribute a modified version of a GPL-covered program:
Taking Adam and Kelly's posts together, it's clear that SkyOS' assessment is wrong and this might be why they aren't shipping what they are required to ship under law--the promise for source is not shipped with the binaries, and neither is complete corresponding source code.
Then you must have misread my post. As for SkyOS' authors, I take a dim view of people who react to a relevant point (such as Adam's) by hiding a critic's words from public view.
I think SCO has filed suit against IBM, not a computer program. SCO's charges should be taken very seriously and examined at face value, just as a court would. This appears to be just what the Free Software community is doing (more productively on Groklaw than on Slashdot
Digital Citizen
SkyOS' developers have (probably inadvertantly) deleted their only copy of the source code which corresponds to the GPL-covered binaries they distribute as part of SkyOS versions 3 and 4. This means they are incapable of complying with the GNU GPL because they cannot supply the necessary source code. This is disturbing because they continue to distribute infringing binaries as I write this. This is not an unfixable situation. This is a situation SkyOS' developers have chosen not to fix until some indeterminate date in the future.
To make matters worse, discussing the situation on their forums has become untenable. At least one forum poster (Adam) has had his posts removed apparently for speaking uncomfortable truths. It is impossible now to determine exactly what he said that was so offensive to the SkyOS forum moderators. As far as anyone can infer, by judging from Adam's remaining posts, he did not say anything offensive. It is likely that Adam explained how the SkyOS distributors were non-compliant. Chris (another poster to the SkyOS forums) and I have repeatedly requested that SkyOS stop distributing the infringing binaries from their forum. Apparently their reaction is to dismiss our requests.
This is why I recommend everyone steer clear of SkyOS for now and reevaluate it in version 5. When someone violates the license on a work that allows sharing and modification, a great deal of harm comes to those who are prohibited from leveraging their rights under a copylefted Free Software license. We are all out the improvements SkyOS' developers made to their version of the GPL-covered programs as well as the improvements that future derivative works could have implemented.
SkyOS' developers have promised they will fix their source code retention problems and become compliant for version 5 of SkyOS.
Digital Citizen