Slashdot Mirror


Thunderbird and Firefox Ported to SkyOS

Proph3t writes "The up and coming operating system, SkyOS has just announced the ports of Thunderbird and Firefox, both in their 1.0 stable versions. Moreover, they will be releasing a 30-page guide on how to port these two excellent Mozilla applications to alternative operating systems soon."

7 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. SkyOS by conteXXt · · Score: 4, Funny

    dollars to doughnuts it will be plagued with viruses as soon as they hook it up to SKYNET.

    We are all doomed.

    --
    The truth about Led Zep should never be told on /. (Karma suicide ensues)
  2. 30 pages? by CrackedButter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Holy shit! Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I couldn't work out how the blurb was trying to spin it.

  3. Re:Slashdotted in the mysterious future? by NetNifty · · Score: 5, Informative

    Mirror here.

  4. 30 'pages' by Leffe · · Score: 4, Funny

    A 30-page guide on avoiding Slashdotting would be more helpful I think.

    http://www.skyos.org.nyud.net:8090/

    Hehe, they used Slashdot in the Firefox screenshots, it's like they are asking for it :)

  5. Never ceases to amaze me by sethadam1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...nothing particularly exciting..

    I love the gumption of Slashdotters. Such an arrogance to everything. A guy decides to more or less code an entire OS by himself, ports nearly all the apps, and has a running OS that does things in a pretty unique way, and some holier-than-thou nerd, with, I might add, zero credentials that we know of, immediately dismisses it. No wonder OSS gets a bad rap, this is the attitude of our citizens.

    1. Re:Never ceases to amaze me by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But why would it be exciting?

      Yes, it's a great job on his part, few of us here would be able to pull it off, but why should we get excited? What does it offer? Just because someone doesn't get excited about it doesn't mean he dimisses his work. Heck, it might be a very powerful OS. But it's commercial. And it has basically no software developed for it, with little reason to believe it should increase in popularity, considering the already well established competition. To me it needs to offer something unique to be something else than a hobby project. And as long as it's that, why should the general public be excited? Please correct me if I'm wrong though.

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  6. Re:Slashdotted in the mysterious future? by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I'd be happy with something not Unix based, as long as it's an open system - open in the sense of being open source/free software, expandable, etc. It needs to support TCP/IP, and it has to be mainstream enough to not cause massive problems with the concept of porting software. If AROS had more drivers and had memory protection, I'd be tempted by it because the UI works the way I want a computer to work.

    But SkyOS isn't really it. It's a nice design, apparently, and it's got a mainstream enough design to make porting far from impossible (as this article shows), but it's proprietary (I can't make modifications to it or support myself) and it doesn't have the support of a large organization that'll be around for years.

    The SkyOS fan club might want to look at Atheos. There, again, was an operating system developed by a single individual to furfill his vision. He then, for reasons unknown, dropped out of sight.

    Thankfully, for Atheos users, he'd taken the precaution of GPL'ing the system. So Atheos users were able to support themselves, eventually making an official fork of the no-longer-maintained system, and continue development.

    I use Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and OpenBSD. The former is proprietary but supported by a group that's not going to go away. The latter two are open and support for either's not going to go away. I have moral issues with the former, but for now, it's a good system and from a practical perspective, there's no issue with continuing to use it. SkyOS doesn't really fit as either, and past experience of pointing this out shows that, by and large, SkyOS's major online advocates are a bunch of loud-mouthed jerks who'll accuse anyone of being a free software "zealot" for pointing out the obvious (even when, as I did then and continue to do now, I said it was a choice between having major, guaranteed, commercial support or making it free software.)

    So I can't really use it in the hope that if something goes wrong the SkyOS people will do the right thing and find a way to get users the support they need. I don't think they will, they're ideologically opposed to doing so. And because of that, they've created practical barriers to anyone who wants to use it for anything but the most trivial purposes.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.