How Haiku Is Building a Better BeOS

angry tapir writes "BeOS may be dead, but over a decade after its lamentable demise the open source Haiku project keeps its legacy alive. Haiku is an attempt to build a drop-in, binary compatible replacement for BeOS, as well as extending the defunct OS's functionality and support for modern hardware. At least, that's the short-term goal — eventually, Haiku is intended significantly enhance BeOS while maintaining the same philosophy of simplicity and transparency, and without being weighed down with the legacy code of many other contemporary operating systems. I recently caught up with Stephan Aßmus, who has been a key contributor to the project for seven years to talk about BeOS, the current state of Haiku and the project's future plans."

Comments

Haiku

[wonkey_monkey]

BeOS may be dead
But the only question is
Will I get first post?

Re:Haiku

[Chris Mattern]

From which I can deduce that you pronounce "BeOS" as "bee-oss" and not "bee-oh-ess" (the latter is how the BeOS FAQ says it should be pronounced (http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/support/qandas/faqs/faq-0407.html)).

Re:Haiku

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, call me when the ARM port is functional enough for the nightly builds, and I'll try it on a Raspberry Pi.

Re:Haiku

[cupantae]

Pronunciation
changes to accommodate
those who write po-ems

Re:Haiku

[sgage]

There once was a man from Lahore
Whose limericks stopped at line four.
When asked why this was,
He said, "just because".

Riding off into the sunset

[MetalliQaZ]

I admire their work. They've obviously done some impressive things to preserve that community. I just don't understand them. BeOS hasn't really progressed at all in the past...what? 8 years? At this point they may as well be hacking on Amiga or Plan9. by the time they're done, we're all going to be running on browser-based platforms that use the OS as a layer to support the fancy proprietary graphics drivers. I'm simplifying of course, but that would sure sap my enthusiasm for an OS project.

Re:Riding off into the sunset

[jellomizer]

Computing has a lot of interesting history, and keeping ideas going can come in handy.
We had the first computer that was rather hard wired. No network just crunched numbers.
Then we had the Mainframe, this offered more remote computing with time share and remote dumb terminals.
Then we had the PC, it took over a lot of the mainframe space because every one had their own computing power on their desk and didn't need all that wiring.
Then we got more Web Applications because networking has gotten cheaper and faster, and servers can do a bulk of the work faster and share across many systems.
Then we got mobile devices with apps. As wireless internet is expensive.

Now if wireless companies start offering cheaper and faster internet we will being to see Mobile apps going away and being replaced with more HTML5/other language web apps, and we will be less considered about app lock in.
Then we will get new technology that processes data much better then what we can do over the network and we will go back to apps again...

Ideas came up generations ago, that were considered outdated, or just not useful often get a new life due to new features.
For example compare Windows 8 UI with Plan 9 UI. They are moving away from Windows and to Frames. Also there is a case with newer smaller technology that comes across will need a small light OS (for the time) keeping the Old Concept OS's updated and working, keeps ideas fresh and sometimes they will use them and give them a new life.

Re:Riding off into the sunset

[Kjella]

If he was saying they were going to take down Linux or something, then I'd say they were bat shit crazy but really all they're saying is that they want to try doing their own thing. I think every developer has that "If I could just rewrite this from scratch without having to deal with all the old cruft, it would be soooooooo much better" itch. Maybe the goal isn't competing, it could be sheer accomplishment as in I wrote this and it works great. It could be recognition, that others see the quality of your craft. It could be inspiration, that by showing it as a proof of concept in a small and nimble OS it might be picked up by others. Of course you could end up reinventing the wheel or worse, but then that's a learning experience - but it's still easier to try and fail in a simpler environment. You get to think more on concepts, less on dealing with old code.

I think that's really one of the strengths of open source, you don't have to get anyone's permission, you don't have to convince any naysayers, you don't have to build a business case. You just have to say "yes I could" and code yourself a better mouse trap. Of course you could do that with Linux too but the whole mainlining process is working against you because it goes into millions of production servers that have to be rock stable. It's probably better for you to be part of a project that's open to such radical changes, to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. Perhaps you don't even have any interest in being in the big pond at all.

Re:Riding off into the sunset

[jonadab]

> BeOS hasn't really progressed at all in the past...what? 8 years?

Twelve years, give or take a couple of months

Unless you count updated hardware drivers so that it can actually run on a recently manufactured computer as "progress", that is. Personally, I'd call that "treading water".

BeOS is very interesting, and there are definitely some things we can learn from it. I think anyone involved in OS or especially GUI design should make a point of being familiar with it. (The same is also true of VMS, although that has a somewhat higher learning curve.)

I cannot, however, imagine wanting to actually use it as my primary operating system on a day to day basis at this point. I do not see it as a practically useful system today. Haiku perhaps could have been, if it had gotten started much sooner, like, immediately after it became clear in 1996 that Apple was going to buy NeXT and not BeOS, at which point it was already well understood that Be had either failed to convince OEMs to ship BeOS, either as a dual-boot option or solo or that any OEMs they did convince had become unconvinced due to other pressures. Thus, any intelligent person by the end of 1996 could easily figure out that the company was going to go under. If the Haiku project had been started right then, and if the project had progressed much more rapidly once it got underway, if, for example, Haiku R1 had come out in 1998 and a multi-user-enabled R2 in 2000, Haiku might have carved out a significant niche for itself.

But in 1996, and still in 1998, and even still in 2000 for that matter, most BeOS users were in denial about the company's fate and the possibility that store shelves might soon feature computers with BeOS pre-installed, so Haiku didn't even get started at all until 2001 (around the time the company formally announced that it was selling off all its assets and giving up on any possibility of further development in order to salvage what stock-holder value it could). Even as late as 2005 many BeOS users (the ones who had not yet switched to Linux or Mac OS X) were still in denial about the fate of the BeOS R5 source code base and whether whatever company eventually ended up with those assets might either resurrect the OS or else release it under an open-source license. So it's fair to say that Haiku development was a little slow getting started -- a slowness it could ill afford, given how far behind BeOS development had been already. BeOS had some cool advantages compared to the operating systems of the day, such as Windows 95 or, heaven help us, Mac System 7; but there were also some rather notable things it was missing, even then, things that should have been fixed in a subsequent release -- and presumably would have been, if the company had found enough of a market to continue to pay its operating expenses. Haiku, when it was finally started half a decade later, was even further behind, due to the need to start from scratch and reimplement what had already been done -- and once they eventually finish with that, they will still need to design and implement the things that Be had not yet done when it went under.

As a result of those delays, Haiku is still in no position to be adopted as an operating system for regular day-to-day use any time in the forseeable future. Among other things, it has no provision at all for file ownership, user accounts, or (meaningful) permissions. That was one thing in 1996, but now, in an era when we take for granted that everything has to interact with a hostile internet, and so other systems are no longer limiting themselves to simple owner/group permissions but rather are by necessity moving toward adding more complex and discriminating security systems (ACLs, application-level permissions, non-executable memory, ASLR, etc.), the Haiku developers speak of plain old multi-user capability as a pie-in-the-sky "something everyone would like to have" eventually in the distant-future R2. Aside from the obvious implications in multi-user (e.g., business) environments

Re:Riding off into the sunset

[jonadab]

> Could BEOS be used as an alternate GUI for a Unix based system.

You could borrow *ideas* from BeOS if you were designing an alternate GUI for a Unix-type system, or any other system for that matter.

That would be kind of missing the point, though. The BeOS GUI was largely unremarkable. Okay, yes, if you had multiple desktops they could each have a different resolution (and color depth, if desired). At the time, that was innovative. Other systems have it now, of course.

On the whole, though, the really notable things about BeOS were infrastructural, not superficial. To speak of BeOS as a GUI is to rob it of its strengths and everything that makes it really notable.

The way BeOS did multitasking, for example, provided a level of responsiveness that other systems at the time were not able to deliver on similar hardware. That's a kernel design feature, not something you can layer on top when building a GUI.

The BeOS approach to hardware and drivers was really remarkable and completely unprecedented at the time and eliminated several major categories of problems in one fell swoop. Knoppix has since delivered something almost comparable. (I suspect it's probably implemented differently, but the results are similar, if not quite as impressive.)

Then of course there's the filesystem. Personally I'm not terribly fond of the BeOS approach to that (except for the journaling, which has become standard on other systems), but there's no denying that the filesystem, and in particular the unusual metadata handling, was a significant aspect of what made BeOS unique and conceptually interesting, and it's not something you could implement in a GUI without the underpinnings being there in the kernel and in the on-disk filesystem format.

Raspberry Pi?

[a_nonamiss]

Seems like this OS would be a good fit for Raspberry Pi, if someone would take the time to build it for ARM. The fixed hardware and low power of the Pi is just begging for a lightweight, low footprint OS, and people using the Pi aren't really shackled to backwards compatibility. I know absolutely nothing about how to port a kernel, or I'd be right in there trying to figure out how to do this.

Re:Raspberry Pi?

[LifeIs0x2A]

Good idea, but BeOS is lacking the massive software repository that Debian Linux (the current platform for the Pi) is offering, minus the huge development community. The same problem that prevents it from spreading on other platforms as well. Anyway it would be a great alternative. Especially for educational purposes as it is a very clean and efficiently structured OS.

Re:Raspberry Pi?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fixed hardware and low power of the Pi is just begging for a lightweight, low footprint OS

You mean like Linux or BSD?

Linux or BSD only seem lightweight to people who only are familiar with monolithic kernels. Linux and BSD might seem slick compared to Windows but compared to things like BeOS and AmigaOS they are huge and resource draining.

Re:Raspberry Pi?

[Hatta]

I remember reading some of the Haiku mailling list once. Posix compatibilty was brought up, and the prevailing opinion was that they didn't want to become yet another posix app launcher. Too much posix compatibility would cannibalize whatever interest there may be in native Haiku apps.

I see their point. There's little reason to switch from Linux when you're just looking at using the same apps you always would. And if you're interested in writing a new app, you'll be more likely to make an impact with an app on a platform with little software than one that has the whole open source ecosystem available to it. I just hope they have enough interest in their platform to draw app developers and not just OS devs.

Haiku Not Stolen

[Anonymous Coward]

CodeSuite forensic software shows no evidence that Haiku was copied from or was a derivative of BeOS.

It's shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Haiku is based on the excellent micro/monolith hybrid NewOS, and it had a very interesting prospect of becoming a great OS.

Unfortunately, the project is slowly heading towards disaster as more and more incompetent people have started to contribute (think GSoC gone wrong, permanently.)

The code base is 1) not security audited, 2) slow as hell, 3) assbackwards and 4) not having a snowballs chance in hell to work on my 4-way CPU (the memory manager dies under SMP load and must be rewritten.)

I loved BeOS, but this is not going to replace it.

Re:It's shit

[kallisti5]

Unfortunately, the project is slowly heading towards disaster as more and more incompetent people have started to contribute (think GSoC gone wrong, permanently.)

Care to elaborate?

The code base is 1) not security audited,

What says it can't be? Also, Haiku is only single user, so at the moment this doesn't even make sense. (pre-beta software is pre-beta)

2) slow as hell

Umm, most 3rd party reviews mention how fast it is

3) assbackwards

This isn't a statement.

4) not having a snowballs chance in hell to work on my 4-way CPU (the memory manager dies under SMP load and must be rewritten.)

Strange, my eight core AMD bulldozer cpu works just fine.

I loved BeOS, but this is not going to replace it.

Patches welcome

Re:How is this 'news'?

[royallthefourth]

But isn't it exciting to think that you could run all your old favorite programs from BeOS such as