Interview with OpenBeOS Leader Michael Phipps

Gentu writes "Koki from the japanese site jpbe recently interviewed Michael Phipps, the project leader of OpenBeOS, the open source re-implementation of the BeOS. Read here for the english version of the interview where Michael is discussing the roots of the project, the current status, the roadmap, the choice of the MIT license, its relationship to YellowTAB's Zeta and the other efforts to resurrect BeOS, BeUnited and the Sun Java port and more."

Comments

Re:Spot the trend

[AntiOrganic]

At the very least, the Linux desktop movement can learn from BeOS's legendary responsiveness. Kernel 2.6.0 is a good step in the right direction, but GTK+ still just feels painfully slow.

really a shame they're so stubborn

[jbellis]

about not using linux or a bsd kernel. then they'd get all the drivers for free that those projects have... think anyone's going to bother writing drivers for ANOTHER kernel with a fraction of the mindshare? dream on.

He even says in the interview that the kernel is one of the 2 areas most in need of development help. Wake up! ... :(

Re:really a shame they're so stubborn

[BasilBrush]

It's horses for courses. As the article says, Linux was designed for server use, and the BeOS for desktop use. The BeOS had a special feel to it, as the most responsive and multimedia capable OS of it's time. It was designed to handle large numbers of tiny threads and fibers well. Sure you mould a BEOS lookalike system around a Linux Kernel, but it doesn't mean it would feel like BEOS.

Re:really a shame they're so stubborn

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

And then we'd have just another generic distro of *nix. BeOS is different, and proud to be so, to dilute the concept by using "another *nix kernel" would be to defeat the whole purpose.

I for one am very glad they don't, I really don't like *nix (or MS for that matter, but that's another topic altogether)

Re:really a shame they're so stubborn

[AxelTorvalds]

You want to hear my BeOS experience? I thought it might be a fun niche. I forked out the cash, I bought the OS, bought the metrowerks dev kit, bought the books. Opened up and I was amped. It was a fun toy. I joined the dev program. 6+ years ago MW and Be were promisng a java port, I thought that would be nice and make this legitimate. Never happened. Then they killed the MW deal and completely shifted to gcc, which is cool, it just cost me $200+. At least I didn't buy in to the PowerPC idea...

The whole time, being a Linux user and developer, I was talking about opensourcing this and that, there was so much opensource in BeOS to begin with, why not take the bull by the horns. Be used Linux as a host platform to develop beos. Be used GCC. Be carped driver designs, and an OS platform from GPL libre software. Nothing ever happened. I even wrote to the company and explained it, the response is that we don't want to help linux, we want to be Be. Now the community is doing this and they are still against Linux; their FAQ even mentions that OpenBeos on linux would be an extension to linux and that is somehow a bad thing.

Long story short, I've got no sour grapes, I don't care about the money, time, effort or anything else, I think some of the ideas behind beos are cool. What chaps me is the unwillingness to play ball and the simple lack of a techincal explanation as to what Linux or BSD kernels (which ones did you look at?) doesn't do that the be kernel needs. Are we talking new APIs? Are talking messaging queues? Latency isn't there (I call bullshit on this one, especially with 2.4 and now 2.6) what exactly is it? In the interview he even says outright that he hasn't gone very deep, pretty much just dismissed it.

Be's problem as a company and a community has always been lot's of talk with no beef and some awful fear of playing with others. "Pervasive threading this," "media OS that" what does that mean? Why is it good? You'll never get an answer with numbers, at best "it feels" will be said. Further, in specifics, what is it that you need the linux kernel to do and why is it easier to start from scratch rather than fix linux to do that? Even if it isn't rolled into mainline, look at ucLinux, rtLinux, and other "forks." I'm simply asking as an engineer, which problem space is bigger? Again, I wish them well and have no real sour grapes other than I really want a project like this to succeed and from the information presented to me from them they aren't making good engineering decisions and aren't making a plan for success. If it's simply an experiment and they want to do it all then say that, but they aren't saying that and that makes me think they either don't know or it's some cultural flaw and either way I don't think it is a good thing for their success.

Re:Please give us Firebird first

[aaronvegh]

Mod parent -1 Troll!

This is not a development effort of "just because I want to". A new OS that is open source increases the size of our OS ecosystem...this is one of the greatest threats that Linux poses against MS. Linux today enjoys widespread support, but having more choices out there is a very good thing. Who can say what the OS landscape will look like in 5-10 years? Think back even five years and you'll see what I mean!

As a supposed Linux user, would you then bash OBOS because it wasn't Linux? That's hypocritical at best, and spiteful at worst.

Waste of Time?

[Anonymous Coward]

You may consider it a waste of time but I assume those involved in the project don't. For example, do you consider watching a movie a complete waste of time, how about playing a board game or D&D, what about any sort of hobby you may have that really benifits no one but yourself. How about art -- maybe that doodle you did that no one else will see. Is all of this a complete "waste of time" ? If it is so what, they are doing something they enjoy for whatever reason.

No they are not required to contribute to a project that you view as more important, nor are they required to not "waste" their time. So piss off and let them have fun, hell others may benifit at the same time even if you don't see it.

Re:BeGone

[bluFox]

[I wish more developers however would come together under one roof
and make he all-in-one super-ninja-hop-chop-socky OS]

According to what standards ? or better whose standards?
Do you honestly think that all the needs of the diverse environments can be filled by a single os? Think of the difference between the server , desktop and mainframe,

Second, is the cross-distro-platform thing desirable always? doesn't it also mean that you get the denominator of all but not the 100% for the particular platform?

Third, what happens when the super-ninja approach is proved wrong, or when it hits a wall (where radical innovation is no more possible or is painful) as it seems to be happening in X servers
surely it is better to have on of the alternatives at hand (that may not have the limitations) than having to invent something from the scratch

Age of Spiritual Machines

[bstadil]

You make an excellent point. Assuming some Darwinian development pressures at play on Operation Systems, we need a high degree of Chaos or Entropy in the system in order to have rapid development.

In Kurzweils excellent book Age of Spiritual Machines he is referencing some computer experiments on developments of Artificial "Lifeforms".

One of the unexpected things the researchers found (can't remember who it was) was that increasing the "Mutation rate" was not enough. You needed a complex and rapid changing Ecosystem.

OS's that finds it way into new application areas provides presicely such an Ecosystem that the dominant OS might later adapt to.

As an axample we can look at embedded devices. The pressure from Symbian in the Smartphone market causes Linux and Windows for that matter to change and adapt. The adaption does not need to be Monolithic as is the case with Windows but an OS bifurcation is fine and actually more akin to the real world evolution. In that sense OpenBeOS can be a real plus to everyone. User or not

Well, Your point is well taken

intolerance of other poeples business

[Selecter]

It seems to be a /. point of view that anything outside of the Linux arena is a waste of time in some manner. If these folks want to try to revive BeOS, what business is it of yours, and why go on about it? There's 3 things BeOS had going for it - lighting fast GUI responsiveness, excellent handling of both audio and video media, and a way before it's time journaling FS that allowed you to yank the AC plug out of the wall with no data corruption. I daresay only one of these has been implemented on *nix ( the FS ) and the other two are still MIA. Until you open source guys get linux up to the same speed in the other 2 areas that they are concerned with, dont bother asking why they are working on OpenBeOS. They are doing it becuase even after 5 years not one operating system made compares in those 2 areas. And in general, pissing on other peoples parades shows insecurity about what you are doing. Let em alone.

Re:OS "ecosystem"? WTF?

[bstadil]

The point of computing is to solve problems, once your problem is solved move on.

Even if I agreed with you, which I do not, you are wrong even on your own premisses.

Problems can be solved in two ways. A point solution and a general solution.

Point solutions as you advocate tend to created further problems down the line so they are sub-optimal when looked at in a larger context.

Since you seem to value the Eco-system comparison, your suggested point solution is like the Koala Bear only being able to eat Eucalyptus leaves.

Not a good idea when the eucalyptus plant is disappearing. Compare this to a Rat that eats anything. FOOS development process secures that mostly Rats is being created not pretty and cuddly proprietary Koalas.

Re:OS "ecosystem"? WTF?

[ReallyQuietGuy]

once your problem is solved move on

what makes you think the problem is "solved"?

has any OS achieved perfection?

Re:Spot the trend

[ortcutt]

Owen Taylor discussed GTK+ performance on OSnews recently. He wrote: "A big bottleneck right now in GTK+ performance is the poor performance of the RENDER extension drawing anti-aliased text. Even without hardware acceleration, it could be tens of times faster than it is now. I'm hopeful that the X server work currently ongoing on freedesktop.org will result in that being fixed." Neither Linux nor GTK+ are the problem. X is slow. BeOS doesn't use X. BTW, this isn't an attack on X, which I think is great. It is slow though.

Re:Spot the trend

[be-fan]

Actually, for what it does (draw graphics on the screen) X is really fast. I've benchmarked it myself, as have many other people. The problem is in the toolkits and the applications. Its really hard to get good GUI feel* and you'd be surprised to see the number of "tricks" you notice in Windows to make it feel faster. Owen Taylor's comment about GTK+ seems dubious to me --- RENDER is accelerated (that subset used to draw anti-aliased text anyway) on NVIDIA's binary drivers, and GTK+ isn't any faster on those than it is normally. GTK+ is definately glacial. Qt, however, is pretty damn fast, as is KDE overall.

*> Things get much easier if you do what OS X (and now freedesktop.org's new X server) do. They back-buffer all windows, so the app never needs to handle expose events. They also synchronize all resize events, so the window frame doesn't enlarge until the app can draw the new contents.

Re:Unresolved issues

[unixbob]

Actually I think the most criticized OS on /. is BSD. I've yet to see a BSD story posted in the last 12 months without numerous trolls about BSD being dead.

With the increase in corporate interest in many open source projects, I think sometimes people miss the point about OSS. To qoute your post:

I guess it comes down to these questions: is BeOS fundamentally a more efficient platform for multimedia development? Is Linux architecture so different as to be incapable of matching BeOS performance in regards to MIDI performance, audio processing, nonlinear video editing, or 3D development? Is the performance gap substantial?

I've read the interview with Micheal Phillips and his comments seem to say that there is a way of doing things which the original BeOS did, which Linux doesn't / can't do. So from a technical standpoint he and other open source developers are trying to implement an idea and way of doing things. Linux and BSD didn't do things the way they wanted it doing. So they took it uppon themselves to implement something which they feel is better.

With it being open source, and therefore something they do in their spare time for enjoyment, I don't see that market forces come into it. Linux started gaining market share due to the quality of the product. Perhaps in a few years if OpenBEOS is so revolutionary and amazing then the same may happen. Or if it becomes a popular desktop for geeks and developers then is that really so bad?