My understanding is that it's not meant to be upgradeable at all. In addition to being misreported as a Linux box, it's really a misrepresentation to call the iToaster a normal PC--it's closer to a cross between WebTV and the Canon Cat (a really cool piece of hardware partially designed by Mac designer Jef Raskin). This is not aimed at the typical Slashdot crowd, or even pretend power users; it's aimed at people who want to be able to surf the net and do "computer-like things" like word processing and spreadsheets, without actually buying a computer.
As for what they might be taking from Linux, I doubt it's much of anything but buzzwords. Non-tech people know the name Linux and go "ooo" when it's mentioned; Be doesn't have that luxury. There'd be little point in porting X to BeOS for this kind of device.
While the Second Reality demo is very impressive, it's "canned." The animation it shows is known, uncompressed data. If you want to write a program for MS-DOS that duplicates the spinning cube of BeOS' "3dmov" application, it needs to be able to decompress and scale movies on the fly, let users change the movies by dragging and dropping files and respond to user input for controlling the cube's spin direction and speed. I'm sure that could be done under other operating systems, but it'd probably be painful--and I doubt it'd be as responsive as the BeOS version.
(And before anyone else responds, no, BeOS isn't a good server platform. Blah blah blah single-user blah blah blah TCP/IP stack blah blah blah Linux roolz. Happy?:) )
I've been reading this thread and have been pretty disgusted with all the Be zealots badmouthing Open Source.
Hm. There are certainly Be zealots out there, but most of us like Open Source. We badmouth the "Open Source is the only way to salvation" mindset. I respect the choice some people make to go open source all the way, but I don't buy the "you are enslaving yourself to proprietary software if you use it" mindset. I am fully aware of all the advantages of open source development. But just like I buy products with "no user serviceable parts inside" if that product does what I want, I will buy "closed" software if it is a superior solution. If you won't, that's fine, but I'm sick of having the more... mmm... energetic free software advocates tell me I'm an idiot for my choice.
I could go on, but the point of this message isn't to flame...
As evidenced by your use of "BeOS lusers."
So far I've found Be users to be the most obnoxious of any group.
To me "who gives a shit if it's not open source" is more obnoxious than "BeOS is really cool, let me fanboy about it," even if the latter is irritating.
...maybe if Be were open source I'd be developing for them instead.
If you're developing open source software for Linux, you just might be developing open source software for BeOS, too. That's part of what "open source" means. Isn't that ironic?
According to Be's feature spec list, at least, R4.5 has limited FireWire support--at least enough to interface with DV cameras, assuming the drivers are there.
And, yes, R4.5 is better for hardware support in general. It's no longer horrifying, it's merely dismaying.:-)
Interesting question. There was an attempt at a "BeGTK" or some such, which had its plug pulled recently.
One would think that their lives would be made much simpler by porting GTK+ first. Then again, they might want to make it have a BeOS "look and feel" and do something different. (Maybe a way to map GTK+ calls to BeOS API calls, if that didn't prove to be much more trouble than it was worth?)
I'm sure lots of people will point out that R4.5 supports both the TNT and TNT2, with a non-beta driver now, and it has a VESA 2.0 driver built-in, too.
Having said that, I really hope Be gets drivers for the "real" OpenGL cards like the FireGL and Oxygen series. Somebody out there somewhere is working on Permedia 2/3 drivers, so rumor has it, and there will be drivers for the Matrox G400 card... but even so.
Despite the skeptics, though, I think we might see those drivers within a year. There's shipping support for high-end audio cards like Emu's ASP, Echo's Gina/Layla/Darla, Emagic's I/O card and Yamaha's "midrange" 192XG.
Including source as a "protection" against companies going under--or just for people who are capable of hacking on their own--is probably a good policy. I think people tend to forget, though, that "source licenses" predate open source by two or three decades. If I make a shareware program and send you the source when you register it, I could grant you the rights to modify it for your personal use only and the rights to freely distribute patches against my baseline source, but not the rights to redistribute the complete source or binaries in any form or to use my source in other projects. This is clearly not open source, yet it doesn't prevent the user community from finding and fixing bugs or enhancing my product, sharing those bug fixes or enhancements with one another, or even continuing to develop the product if I stop development (although in the latter case it would prevent the user community from growing).
For-profit corporations exist to make money. ("Duh," you say.) No, the point isn't to make you go duh, but to re-iterate that all other considerations are secondary. The difference between an ethical corporation and an unethical one is the difference in how they achieve their profits. No matter how ethical the corporation is, though, the "right thing" is that which leads, directly or indirectly, to higher returns.
People in the "open source community" need to keep this in mind when evaluating what companies are doing with their source code. The fact of the matter is that very few companies will be releasing source with GPL-style licenses for the purpose of examples, unless it's source that's specific to that one example. (If Be wants to get people to write more graphic card drivers for BeOS, they'll release the source code to a graphic card driver, not the source code to the BeOS application server.)
I've argued before that companies that expect to make the bulk of their profit from software can't afford to release that software open-source (it has to be something that people will be willing to shell out continuing money for to get support, like Cygnus's multi-thousand-dollar cross-compilation products). From a profit standpoint, the best reasons to go open source are publicity--likely for products which remain closed--and the possibility that you will get your development work done for free.
Some might say that's a cynical way of saying "improvement of the code," and granted, it is. But sometimes cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. If Apple folds your hacks to Darwin into a future release of MacOS X, will you get compensated for it? How about Red Hat? I'm not accusing them of evil motivations, mind you; it's simply that the part of the "open source equation" most appealing to investors and accountants is the possibility of selling an $80 operating system with ongoing support contracts that you spent perhaps 2-3% as much developing as an "evil closed source" company like Be.
This is not an argument against open source (or an argument against closed source, for that matter), but a note of harsh realism. As open source becomes a buzzword, to most companies--even "good citizens"--the bottom line will become that it's not free as in speech or beer, but as in labor.
Yes. Microsoft owns everything. They own Slashdot, too, and run it as a place for Linux hackers to vent their spleen ineffectually.
Or it could be that Salon is sympathetic to Linux and agrees with the contention that the test is set up in such a way as to give NT the most advantage possible.
Some of the Linux community is reminding me more and more of the old Amiga community, with the "every little thing they do is FUD" seige mentality. (You think a single Amiga 2000 couldn't redo all the special effects from Independence Day faster and at a fraction of the cost? You must be a real anti-Amiga bigot!) You see the same mentality in some Macintosh users, who cannot accept the possibility that one might buy a PC for reasons other than secret mind control messages embedded in "Intel Inside" television ads.
Not everything that everyone utters that fails to put Linux in the best of all possible lights is part of a grand conspiracy to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt around the universe. Sometimes the negative comments have ulterior motives behind them (which was the real argument against the Mindcraft test); more often than not they come from misinformation, misunderstandings or, at worst, willful ignorance. And there are cases, like it or not, where other operating systems do have an advantage for some users. Maybe you're not a member of the community that wants that advantage, and that's okay (the things that make the Amiga great for video production aren't important to you, or perfect color-matching between print and screen isn't enough to get you to buy a Macintosh). Maybe it's an advantage you would like to see in Linux, and you'll take advantage of the openness of the OS to add new functionality that narrows (or even closes) the gap. But denying the possibility that other operating systems might have some things that intelligent users could be attracted to--yes, even Windows NT, like it or not--is just generating FUD of your own.
There are signs that there'll be distributors for it other than Be themselves this time around. Computability already lists it, and there will probably be others soon.
Why, it's almost as silly as using a handle that uses numbers instead of letters to show the world how k00l you are.
Re:o/~ Troll, troll, troll, troll... o/~
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I figured someone would say this. Two replies:
(1) No, the MacOS X kernel is called Mach.
(2) If you hack Darwin, more power to you, but that's not hacking MacOS X. Darwin is, as Apple puts it, "a complete operating system based on the foundation technologies in Mac OS X Server." It's described as an "advanced BSD Unix." But it's not described as MacOS X, because it isn't. Hacks you put into Darwin are going to remain with Darwin.
o/~ Troll, troll, troll, troll... o/~
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Yes, I'm sure their recently-announced IPO, their premiere at PC Expo and the two-dozen-odd professional audio companies writing software or drivers are all part of a conspiracy to dupe users from noticing nobody likes the platform. e-Picture is a clever illusion, Adamation's Personal Studio is really just a PowerPoint presentation in disguise, and who would want to buy LCS's BeOS-based theatre control system, anyway? (Disney, Cirque de Soleil, and Broadway production companies are all part of the conspiracy.)
I suppose I can't blame some Macintosh and Linux users for wanting to take the opportunity to spread a little FUD of their own given the tremendous FUD-spreading both those platforms have taken over the years. But FUD is FUD. The "BeOS has no applications" schtick is getting pretty old at this point to those of us who've been using applications on it on a daily basis. Yes, Linux has more applications for it. So? Windows has more applications than Linux, and I'm not using it, either. No, I don't have the freedom to hack the kernel source. So? I won't have that with MacOS X, either, and while I like free software (in both the speech and beer sense), hacking isn't my primary use for computers, and I part company with Mr. Stallman when he maintains I am enslaving myself to a manufacturer anytime I purchase something with no user servicable parts inside. If these are "make or break" deals for you--you absolutely won't use a non-open OS, or no other graphics program but Photoshop will do--you'll choose appropriately.
While I consider it doubtful that the company's going to be bought, the fact that Jobs only draws a $1/yr salary from Apple is not very relevant. The CEO of Netscape also drew only a $1/yr salary, and he didn't have a job at Pixar. But he had stock options from Netscape. To play devil's advocate, it's not entirely irrelevant to remember how Netscape's CEO ultimately made his last batch of money from the company.
And, while Apple's $6.3B market capitalization is indeed high, that wouldn't be a showstopper for the companies that show up in the variations on this rumor. (Sony has a $40B market capitalization, and Disney a $60B.)
The question is ultimately whether or not these companies think they'd have something to gain by buying Apple. While Sony and Apple may be targeting similar markets, Apple doesn't fill in any gaps in Sony's product line. (One can argue that Macintoshes are intrinsically more attractive to media creators than Sony PCs, but it's more realistic for Sony to try to give media creators a compelling reason to move to the Vaio line when they outgrow their current computer through interoperability across their video and professional editing lines.) And, while Disney doesn't have a computer line that Apple is competing with, it's questionable as to whether they'd want a computer line. There is no better business case I'm aware of for a "content provider" to market their own computers than there is for a TV network to market their own televisions.
I basically agree with this. I haven't paid for a copy of Linux yet--my current distribution is RH 5.1 [boo hiss, I know] installed from a friend's CD, and before that I actually installed Slackware 2.0 via FTP over modem and SLS [remember that?] from about 30 floppies.
But....
Do the business models for open source really work, especially the first, most-cited one, selling support? Cygnus isn't just selling support, they're selling stuff you don't get by going with gcc alone (read their FAQ, particularly the last question).
And while it's true that there will be people who will buy Red Hat just for the technical support, ultimately will there be enough--can there be enough? One of the arguments for Linux has been the "you can get technical support in a newsgroup for free immediately" shtick. And whether or not it's politically correct, for a lot of people the "free beer" part is just as important as free speech. Even if I do pay Red Hat directly for my copy of Red Hat 6.0, if I then put it on 100 machines their profit has effectively evaporated.
No one can (or at least no one should) argue that open source doesn't produce high-quality software and doesn't have the potential for dazzling development speed, and it can certainly have a place at commercial software companies. But if you can buy my products for a thirtieth what I charge you for and you have no reason to buy my support because you can get equivalent support for free, isn't it only a matter of time before I go out of business?
While Slashdot reported that quickly, they didn't report the followup--that Blender is going to be coming to BeOS and that it was described by the porter as an "error in communication" which Be took responsibility for. The new GL library, to my knowledge, required the rest of Genki (the next OS release), which is still in beta.
I know that when money is brought up people will respond with variants of "but there should be so much more to programming than money" or, alternatively, "look at Red Hat." But neither of those really points to an open-source BeOS being viable.
There is more to programming than money. But the fact is that all programs have development costs in time, and that time is always paid for: the payment is often simply hidden. If you are a high school student, your time is paid for by your parents; if you are a college student, your time is paid for by your tuition. If you are Richard Stallman, your time is paid for by MIT. This software may be free in the "free beer" sense and the "free speech" sense, but both those sense of "free" refer to the end user--not the developers. In a lot of the canonical cases of free software--written at or around college campuses--the development is (significantly) aided by the fact that the developers are supported by the institution.
If this wasn't the case--if the developers were full-time software developers not supported by an institution or by unrelated employment--how do they make money? Just by charging for manuals and support? This isn't a proven model, and the less ongoing support your software needs--support, I might add, of a sort which cannot be simply had for free on the internet--the less viable it is. And, unlike institutions, a for-profit company must eventually recoup its development costs. The FSF doesn't, because your tax dollars are at work keeping emacs going.
And, yes, let's look at Red Hat. They have given back to the open source community; I don't want to look into the Pandora's Box of how much they're riding on other people's coattails, but the fact of the matter is that they don't bear the costs of Linux development. They only bear the costs of developing their own contributions. How significant is this when it's compared to a company like Be? If we look at the S-1 statements, we can see that Red Hat's development costs for all of 1997 and 1998 were less than Be's costs for the first three months of 1999. This is not because Be is inefficient; it's because they're doing nearly everything themselves.
So the relevant question isn't whether or not BeOS would get drivers faster if it were open source (obviously, it would), nor whether an open BeOS could survive the company and mutate in different directions (obviously, it could). The question is: how would an open BeOS recoup development costs for Be? Whether or not it might be more philosophically attractive to have the operating system open (something some BeOS engineers have said themselves), Be, Inc. is not MIT. There is a point in the future at which they must not only break even but turn at least a modest profit in order to stay in business.
"But an open BeOS is independent of Be, that's the point!" Yeah, that's a good business case for not opening it, isn't it? Some of the argument against BeOS I've seen here is genuinely philosophical (while I don't agree with the "I won't use anything but open software" viewpoint, I respect it), but a lot has to do with the $70 asking price. If it came with the source code for $70, would that change that attitude? I'm skeptical. When Red Hat 6.0 came out, a lot of the messages I saw about it were pointing people to the places selling CDs of it for $5. There's a lot of free speech talk, but there's a lot of free beer walk. It'll be an uphill battle to recoup the $50-odd million development costs of BeOS as it is; how can it be taken open source without making that battle harder, or even unwinnable? I don't really think it can... but I'd be interested in hearing people's (non-flaming) thoughts.
opening it, isn't it? Some of the argument against BeOS I've seen here is genuinely philosophical (while I don't agree with the "I won't use anything but open software" viewpoint, I respect it), but a lot has to do with the $70 asking price. If it came with the source code for $70, would that change that attitude? I'm skeptical. When Red Hat 6.0 came out, a lot of the messages I saw about it were pointing people to the places selling CDs of it for $5. There's a lot of free speech talk, but there's a lot of free beer walk. It'll be an uphill battle to recoup the $50-odd million development costs of BeOS as it is; how can it be taken open source without making that battle harder, or even unwinnable? I don't really think it can... but I'd be interested in hearing people's (non-flaming) thoughts.
This is a red herring, of the same sort that used to be used to justify Windows over Linux. (Excepting the new wrinkle of open source, much of the FUD the Linux community spreads about BeOS is alarmingly similar to what I recall from being both a Linux user and a Macintosh user at various points in the past.) While Be the company has been around since 1990, BeOS itself hasn't been in wide circulation for very long at all compared to Linux, and Linux is explicitly designed to be compatible with an OS that came out in the 1970s. Of course Linux has a lot more applications. The rate of development for BeOS has been pretty remarkable, given its age--much faster than what there was for Linux at a comparable age, in fact, and I'm speaking as someone who was using the 0.99-series kernels.
But for God's sake, how many text editors, open source or otherwise, do you use at once? How many mailers? Web browsers? Vector-based drawing programs? Real-time video editing systems? If BeOS only has 10 text editors and Linux has 50, there may be more theoretical choice, but 99% of the users will settle on vi or emacs.
The point of Mr. Hacker's article wasn't that open source is "inherently hard to use," but that Linux is more of a server operating system at this point, and that--in his opinion--it's not going to be able to mount a credible bid for a desktop OS. If you'd like to prove him wrong, don't blather on about how he's promoting "dumbed down" operating systems: whatever BeOS's faults may be, being dumbed down isn't one of them. Instead, figure out what the BeOS UI is doing right and see if you can bring it to X11. (And good luck.)
People who strongly support a minority computer platform for itself rather than for its applications often believe they have found the One True Way, and those who are not followers of the One True Way are infidels to be treated, at best, with scorn. You see this with Amiga users and with Mac users; over the last few years seeing it with Linux users has become very common (at least in geek circles), and we're beginning to see it with BeOS users.
I think the Linux community is susceptible to it in a way that other user groups haven't been, because for a Linux zealot, the One True Way is based on a (sincere) belief that you must have the source code for your operating system. Technical arguments are sidelined--in theory, any new technology can be integrated into the open source model, and a tenet of the faith is that all technologies eventually will be.
For BeOS zealots, conversely, technical arguments are a cornerstone of the faith. The OS must be designed for low latency and high bandwidth from the ground up, so this tenet goes; aggregating new technologies to older ones is to be avoided on performance grounds. Linux started as a rewrite of Minix to bring it up to the functionality of Unix; it may have pure and crunchy philosophical goodness, but that doesn't mean you can edit broadcast-quality video in real time. (And before anyone brings it up, a Linux rendering farm being used on "Titanic" doesn't mean Digital Domain chucked their SGIs. And to give equal time: I don't give a damn HOW many QuickTime files you can play at once under BeOS. It's cute the first time. Now get over it.)
I don't really think logic is going to keep people from looking at OS choice as a religious issue. But, realists can still take heart. Those who aren't religious are going to evaluate Linux and BeOS based on the desired application. Server farms aren't going to be choosing BeOS over Linux, and audio post-production studios aren't going to be choosing Linux over BeOS. BeOS will succeed or fail independently of Linux's various successes (or failures); in fact, its success may very well depend on succeeding in vertical markets where "source openness" isn't a buying consideration at all.
Apple's Macintosh GUI was based on the GUI they developed for the Lisa. The Lisa was released in January 1983, and showed a much stronger Xerox PARC influence than the Mac GUI did (it didn't feel like it was "hiding" the computer from you the way the Mac Finder did, looked more Smalltalk-ish, and interestingly, did cooperative multitasking, something the Mac didn't get for several years after its release). The Macintosh was released a year later in January 1984.
In no way were either the Lisa or the Mac interfaces a derivative of GEM, whose first version was released in March 1985; the first retail PC version wasn't out until September of that year. In fact, Apple sued Digital Research for copying the Macintosh interface, which is why later versions of the GEM Desktop were "downgraded" to have fixed windows and lost the trashcan icon. (This showed up in later versions as the "ViewMax" shell in DR-DOS 5 and 6.)
Sources for this information, with dates, are pretty easy to find. The GEM information comes from the "gemnotes.txt" file available on the site the source code is at; the Lisa information comes from apple-history.com.
Your points are good, but it's important to remember that programmers are being paid for Internet Explorer. The standard anti-free argument you're referring to may sometimes be phrased as "no one will work to create something valuable that'll be given away," but what it really means in practice is "no one will work to create something valuable that they'll never be paid for." This can be abstracted further to "in our society people need money to live, and the GNU-ish free software model provides less opportunity for income."
This is an easy argument to provide counter-examples to, but it's not as easy to refute completely. Richard Stallman doesn't make any money from emacs, but he has a salary from MIT and is allowed to devote a substantial amount of his time to FSF projects--effectively, he is being paid to develop free software.
We're often told that the way you make money through open source is support, and indeed here are commercial success stories like Red Hat, Cygnus and GhostScript. GhostScript's income comes primarily from licensing to hardware manufacturers under a non-GPL license. Cygnus' GNUPro toolkit adds "features and innovations that won't make it to the free distributions immediately." Red Hat's revenue stream (and Caldera's, SuSE's, et. al.) is based on the idea that most people want someone else to put together a Linux distribution for them and don't want to spend half their natural life downloading it. In other words, all of those examples have practical reasons why they're successful, even to an open source skeptic.
The $64,000 question is whether this model can be successfully applied to something like Microsoft Word--or any program that's a relatively painless download and install and isn't likely to need much support--if the programmers require an income to continue development and don't have a Microsoft (or even a Red Hat) behind them to provide a salary that's essentially independent of the return the program generates.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that it's not meant to be upgradeable at all. In addition to being misreported as a Linux box, it's really a misrepresentation to call the iToaster a normal PC--it's closer to a cross between WebTV and the Canon Cat (a really cool piece of hardware partially designed by Mac designer Jef Raskin). This is not aimed at the typical Slashdot crowd, or even pretend power users; it's aimed at people who want to be able to surf the net and do "computer-like things" like word processing and spreadsheets, without actually buying a computer.
As for what they might be taking from Linux, I doubt it's much of anything but buzzwords. Non-tech people know the name Linux and go "ooo" when it's mentioned; Be doesn't have that luxury. There'd be little point in porting X to BeOS for this kind of device.
While the Second Reality demo is very impressive, it's "canned." The animation it shows is known, uncompressed data. If you want to write a program for MS-DOS that duplicates the spinning cube of BeOS' "3dmov" application, it needs to be able to decompress and scale movies on the fly, let users change the movies by dragging and dropping files and respond to user input for controlling the cube's spin direction and speed. I'm sure that could be done under other operating systems, but it'd probably be painful--and I doubt it'd be as responsive as the BeOS version.
...nice try, trollboy.
(And before anyone else responds, no, BeOS isn't a good server platform. Blah blah blah single-user blah blah blah TCP/IP stack blah blah blah Linux roolz. Happy? :) )
I've been reading this thread and have been pretty disgusted with all the Be zealots badmouthing Open Source.
Hm. There are certainly Be zealots out there, but most of us like Open Source. We badmouth the "Open Source is the only way to salvation" mindset. I respect the choice some people make to go open source all the way, but I don't buy the "you are enslaving yourself to proprietary software if you use it" mindset. I am fully aware of all the advantages of open source development. But just like I buy products with "no user serviceable parts inside" if that product does what I want, I will buy "closed" software if it is a superior solution. If you won't, that's fine, but I'm sick of having the more... mmm... energetic free software advocates tell me I'm an idiot for my choice.
I could go on, but the point of this message isn't to flame...
As evidenced by your use of "BeOS lusers."
So far I've found Be users to be the most obnoxious of any group.
To me "who gives a shit if it's not open source" is more obnoxious than "BeOS is really cool, let me fanboy about it," even if the latter is irritating.
If you're developing open source software for Linux, you just might be developing open source software for BeOS, too. That's part of what "open source" means. Isn't that ironic?
According to Be's feature spec list, at least, R4.5 has limited FireWire support--at least enough to interface with DV cameras, assuming the drivers are there.
And, yes, R4.5 is better for hardware support in general. It's no longer horrifying, it's merely dismaying. :-)
Interesting question. There was an attempt at a "BeGTK" or some such, which had its plug pulled recently.
One would think that their lives would be made much simpler by porting GTK+ first. Then again, they might want to make it have a BeOS "look and feel" and do something different. (Maybe a way to map GTK+ calls to BeOS API calls, if that didn't prove to be much more trouble than it was worth?)
I'm sure lots of people will point out that R4.5 supports both the TNT and TNT2, with a non-beta driver now, and it has a VESA 2.0 driver built-in, too.
Having said that, I really hope Be gets drivers for the "real" OpenGL cards like the FireGL and Oxygen series. Somebody out there somewhere is working on Permedia 2/3 drivers, so rumor has it, and there will be drivers for the Matrox G400 card... but even so.
Despite the skeptics, though, I think we might see those drivers within a year. There's shipping support for high-end audio cards like Emu's ASP, Echo's Gina/Layla/Darla, Emagic's I/O card and Yamaha's "midrange" 192XG.
Including source as a "protection" against companies going under--or just for people who are capable of hacking on their own--is probably a good policy. I think people tend to forget, though, that "source licenses" predate open source by two or three decades. If I make a shareware program and send you the source when you register it, I could grant you the rights to modify it for your personal use only and the rights to freely distribute patches against my baseline source, but not the rights to redistribute the complete source or binaries in any form or to use my source in other projects. This is clearly not open source, yet it doesn't prevent the user community from finding and fixing bugs or enhancing my product, sharing those bug fixes or enhancements with one another, or even continuing to develop the product if I stop development (although in the latter case it would prevent the user community from growing).
For-profit corporations exist to make money. ("Duh," you say.) No, the point isn't to make you go duh, but to re-iterate that all other considerations are secondary. The difference between an ethical corporation and an unethical one is the difference in how they achieve their profits. No matter how ethical the corporation is, though, the "right thing" is that which leads, directly or indirectly, to higher returns.
People in the "open source community" need to keep this in mind when evaluating what companies are doing with their source code. The fact of the matter is that very few companies will be releasing source with GPL-style licenses for the purpose of examples, unless it's source that's specific to that one example. (If Be wants to get people to write more graphic card drivers for BeOS, they'll release the source code to a graphic card driver, not the source code to the BeOS application server.)
I've argued before that companies that expect to make the bulk of their profit from software can't afford to release that software open-source (it has to be something that people will be willing to shell out continuing money for to get support, like Cygnus's multi-thousand-dollar cross-compilation products). From a profit standpoint, the best reasons to go open source are publicity--likely for products which remain closed--and the possibility that you will get your development work done for free.
Some might say that's a cynical way of saying "improvement of the code," and granted, it is. But sometimes cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. If Apple folds your hacks to Darwin into a future release of MacOS X, will you get compensated for it? How about Red Hat? I'm not accusing them of evil motivations, mind you; it's simply that the part of the "open source equation" most appealing to investors and accountants is the possibility of selling an $80 operating system with ongoing support contracts that you spent perhaps 2-3% as much developing as an "evil closed source" company like Be.
This is not an argument against open source (or an argument against closed source, for that matter), but a note of harsh realism. As open source becomes a buzzword, to most companies--even "good citizens"--the bottom line will become that it's not free as in speech or beer, but as in labor.
Yes. Microsoft owns everything. They own Slashdot, too, and run it as a place for Linux hackers to vent their spleen ineffectually.
Or it could be that Salon is sympathetic to Linux and agrees with the contention that the test is set up in such a way as to give NT the most advantage possible.
Some of the Linux community is reminding me more and more of the old Amiga community, with the "every little thing they do is FUD" seige mentality. (You think a single Amiga 2000 couldn't redo all the special effects from Independence Day faster and at a fraction of the cost? You must be a real anti-Amiga bigot!) You see the same mentality in some Macintosh users, who cannot accept the possibility that one might buy a PC for reasons other than secret mind control messages embedded in "Intel Inside" television ads.
Not everything that everyone utters that fails to put Linux in the best of all possible lights is part of a grand conspiracy to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt around the universe. Sometimes the negative comments have ulterior motives behind them (which was the real argument against the Mindcraft test); more often than not they come from misinformation, misunderstandings or, at worst, willful ignorance. And there are cases, like it or not, where other operating systems do have an advantage for some users. Maybe you're not a member of the community that wants that advantage, and that's okay (the things that make the Amiga great for video production aren't important to you, or perfect color-matching between print and screen isn't enough to get you to buy a Macintosh). Maybe it's an advantage you would like to see in Linux, and you'll take advantage of the openness of the OS to add new functionality that narrows (or even closes) the gap. But denying the possibility that other operating systems might have some things that intelligent users could be attracted to--yes, even Windows NT, like it or not--is just generating FUD of your own.
There are signs that there'll be distributors for it other than Be themselves this time around. Computability already lists it, and there will probably be others soon.
Why, it's almost as silly as using a handle that uses numbers instead of letters to show the world how k00l you are.
I figured someone would say this. Two replies:
(1) No, the MacOS X kernel is called Mach.
(2) If you hack Darwin, more power to you, but that's not hacking MacOS X. Darwin is, as Apple puts it, "a complete operating system based on the foundation technologies in Mac OS X Server." It's described as an "advanced BSD Unix." But it's not described as MacOS X, because it isn't. Hacks you put into Darwin are going to remain with Darwin.
While the "GeekGadgets" version is older than this, I think, version 20 has been ported. Go to http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~xv9k -oki/en/Emacs.html.
Yes, I'm sure their recently-announced IPO, their premiere at PC Expo and the two-dozen-odd professional audio companies writing software or drivers are all part of a conspiracy to dupe users from noticing nobody likes the platform. e-Picture is a clever illusion, Adamation's Personal Studio is really just a PowerPoint presentation in disguise, and who would want to buy LCS's BeOS-based theatre control system, anyway? (Disney, Cirque de Soleil, and Broadway production companies are all part of the conspiracy.)
I suppose I can't blame some Macintosh and Linux users for wanting to take the opportunity to spread a little FUD of their own given the tremendous FUD-spreading both those platforms have taken over the years. But FUD is FUD. The "BeOS has no applications" schtick is getting pretty old at this point to those of us who've been using applications on it on a daily basis. Yes, Linux has more applications for it. So? Windows has more applications than Linux, and I'm not using it, either. No, I don't have the freedom to hack the kernel source. So? I won't have that with MacOS X, either, and while I like free software (in both the speech and beer sense), hacking isn't my primary use for computers, and I part company with Mr. Stallman when he maintains I am enslaving myself to a manufacturer anytime I purchase something with no user servicable parts inside. If these are "make or break" deals for you--you absolutely won't use a non-open OS, or no other graphics program but Photoshop will do--you'll choose appropriately.
And, while Apple's $6.3B market capitalization is indeed high, that wouldn't be a showstopper for the companies that show up in the variations on this rumor. (Sony has a $40B market capitalization, and Disney a $60B.)
The question is ultimately whether or not these companies think they'd have something to gain by buying Apple. While Sony and Apple may be targeting similar markets, Apple doesn't fill in any gaps in Sony's product line. (One can argue that Macintoshes are intrinsically more attractive to media creators than Sony PCs, but it's more realistic for Sony to try to give media creators a compelling reason to move to the Vaio line when they outgrow their current computer through interoperability across their video and professional editing lines.) And, while Disney doesn't have a computer line that Apple is competing with, it's questionable as to whether they'd want a computer line. There is no better business case I'm aware of for a "content provider" to market their own computers than there is for a TV network to market their own televisions.
I basically agree with this. I haven't paid for a copy of Linux yet--my current distribution is RH 5.1 [boo hiss, I know] installed from a friend's CD, and before that I actually installed Slackware 2.0 via FTP over modem and SLS [remember that?] from about 30 floppies.
But....
Do the business models for open source really work, especially the first, most-cited one, selling support? Cygnus isn't just selling support, they're selling stuff you don't get by going with gcc alone (read their FAQ, particularly the last question).
And while it's true that there will be people who will buy Red Hat just for the technical support, ultimately will there be enough--can there be enough? One of the arguments for Linux has been the "you can get technical support in a newsgroup for free immediately" shtick. And whether or not it's politically correct, for a lot of people the "free beer" part is just as important as free speech. Even if I do pay Red Hat directly for my copy of Red Hat 6.0, if I then put it on 100 machines their profit has effectively evaporated.
No one can (or at least no one should) argue that open source doesn't produce high-quality software and doesn't have the potential for dazzling development speed, and it can certainly have a place at commercial software companies. But if you can buy my products for a thirtieth what I charge you for and you have no reason to buy my support because you can get equivalent support for free, isn't it only a matter of time before I go out of business?
While Slashdot reported that quickly, they didn't report the followup--that Blender is going to be coming to BeOS and that it was described by the porter as an "error in communication" which Be took responsibility for. The new GL library, to my knowledge, required the rest of Genki (the next OS release), which is still in beta.
The full text of this is the comment below this one. Sorry about that.
I know that when money is brought up people will respond with variants of "but there should be so much more to programming than money" or, alternatively, "look at Red Hat." But neither of those really points to an open-source BeOS being viable.
There is more to programming than money. But the fact is that all programs have development costs in time, and that time is always paid for: the payment is often simply hidden. If you are a high school student, your time is paid for by your parents; if you are a college student, your time is paid for by your tuition. If you are Richard Stallman, your time is paid for by MIT. This software may be free in the "free beer" sense and the "free speech" sense, but both those sense of "free" refer to the end user--not the developers. In a lot of the canonical cases of free software--written at or around college campuses--the development is (significantly) aided by the fact that the developers are supported by the institution.
If this wasn't the case--if the developers were full-time software developers not supported by an institution or by unrelated employment--how do they make money? Just by charging for manuals and support? This isn't a proven model, and the less ongoing support your software needs--support, I might add, of a sort which cannot be simply had for free on the internet--the less viable it is. And, unlike institutions, a for-profit company must eventually recoup its development costs. The FSF doesn't, because your tax dollars are at work keeping emacs going.
And, yes, let's look at Red Hat. They have given back to the open source community; I don't want to look into the Pandora's Box of how much they're riding on other people's coattails, but the fact of the matter is that they don't bear the costs of Linux development. They only bear the costs of developing their own contributions. How significant is this when it's compared to a company like Be? If we look at the S-1 statements, we can see that Red Hat's development costs for all of 1997 and 1998 were less than Be's costs for the first three months of 1999. This is not because Be is inefficient; it's because they're doing nearly everything themselves.
So the relevant question isn't whether or not BeOS would get drivers faster if it were open source (obviously, it would), nor whether an open BeOS could survive the company and mutate in different directions (obviously, it could). The question is: how would an open BeOS recoup development costs for Be? Whether or not it might be more philosophically attractive to have the operating system open (something some BeOS engineers have said themselves), Be, Inc. is not MIT. There is a point in the future at which they must not only break even but turn at least a modest profit in order to stay in business.
"But an open BeOS is independent of Be, that's the point!" Yeah, that's a good business case for not opening it, isn't it? Some of the argument against BeOS I've seen here is genuinely philosophical (while I don't agree with the "I won't use anything but open software" viewpoint, I respect it), but a lot has to do with the $70 asking price. If it came with the source code for $70, would that change that attitude? I'm skeptical. When Red Hat 6.0 came out, a lot of the messages I saw about it were pointing people to the places selling CDs of it for $5. There's a lot of free speech talk, but there's a lot of free beer walk. It'll be an uphill battle to recoup the $50-odd million development costs of BeOS as it is; how can it be taken open source without making that battle harder, or even unwinnable? I don't really think it can... but I'd be interested in hearing people's (non-flaming) thoughts.
opening it, isn't it? Some of the argument against BeOS I've seen here is genuinely philosophical (while I don't agree with the "I won't use anything but open software" viewpoint, I respect it), but a lot has to do with the $70 asking price. If it came with the source code for $70, would that change that attitude? I'm skeptical. When Red Hat 6.0 came out, a lot of the messages I saw about it were pointing people to the places selling CDs of it for $5. There's a lot of free speech talk, but there's a lot of free beer walk. It'll be an uphill battle to recoup the $50-odd million development costs of BeOS as it is; how can it be taken open source without making that battle harder, or even unwinnable? I don't really think it can... but I'd be interested in hearing people's (non-flaming) thoughts.
But for God's sake, how many text editors, open source or otherwise, do you use at once? How many mailers? Web browsers? Vector-based drawing programs? Real-time video editing systems? If BeOS only has 10 text editors and Linux has 50, there may be more theoretical choice, but 99% of the users will settle on vi or emacs.
The point of Mr. Hacker's article wasn't that open source is "inherently hard to use," but that Linux is more of a server operating system at this point, and that--in his opinion--it's not going to be able to mount a credible bid for a desktop OS. If you'd like to prove him wrong, don't blather on about how he's promoting "dumbed down" operating systems: whatever BeOS's faults may be, being dumbed down isn't one of them. Instead, figure out what the BeOS UI is doing right and see if you can bring it to X11. (And good luck.)
People who strongly support a minority computer platform for itself rather than for its applications often believe they have found the One True Way, and those who are not followers of the One True Way are infidels to be treated, at best, with scorn. You see this with Amiga users and with Mac users; over the last few years seeing it with Linux users has become very common (at least in geek circles), and we're beginning to see it with BeOS users.
I think the Linux community is susceptible to it in a way that other user groups haven't been, because for a Linux zealot, the One True Way is based on a (sincere) belief that you must have the source code for your operating system. Technical arguments are sidelined--in theory, any new technology can be integrated into the open source model, and a tenet of the faith is that all technologies eventually will be.
For BeOS zealots, conversely, technical arguments are a cornerstone of the faith. The OS must be designed for low latency and high bandwidth from the ground up, so this tenet goes; aggregating new technologies to older ones is to be avoided on performance grounds. Linux started as a rewrite of Minix to bring it up to the functionality of Unix; it may have pure and crunchy philosophical goodness, but that doesn't mean you can edit broadcast-quality video in real time. (And before anyone brings it up, a Linux rendering farm being used on "Titanic" doesn't mean Digital Domain chucked their SGIs. And to give equal time: I don't give a damn HOW many QuickTime files you can play at once under BeOS. It's cute the first time. Now get over it.)
I don't really think logic is going to keep people from looking at OS choice as a religious issue. But, realists can still take heart. Those who aren't religious are going to evaluate Linux and BeOS based on the desired application. Server farms aren't going to be choosing BeOS over Linux, and audio post-production studios aren't going to be choosing Linux over BeOS. BeOS will succeed or fail independently of Linux's various successes (or failures); in fact, its success may very well depend on succeeding in vertical markets where "source openness" isn't a buying consideration at all.
No. No no no.
Apple's Macintosh GUI was based on the GUI they developed for the Lisa. The Lisa was released in January 1983, and showed a much stronger Xerox PARC influence than the Mac GUI did (it didn't feel like it was "hiding" the computer from you the way the Mac Finder did, looked more Smalltalk-ish, and interestingly, did cooperative multitasking, something the Mac didn't get for several years after its release). The Macintosh was released a year later in January 1984.
In no way were either the Lisa or the Mac interfaces a derivative of GEM, whose first version was released in March 1985; the first retail PC version wasn't out until September of that year. In fact, Apple sued Digital Research for copying the Macintosh interface, which is why later versions of the GEM Desktop were "downgraded" to have fixed windows and lost the trashcan icon. (This showed up in later versions as the "ViewMax" shell in DR-DOS 5 and 6.)
Sources for this information, with dates, are pretty easy to find. The GEM information comes from the "gemnotes.txt" file available on the site the source code is at; the Lisa information comes from apple-history.com.
Your points are good, but it's important to remember that programmers are being paid for Internet Explorer. The standard anti-free argument you're referring to may sometimes be phrased as "no one will work to create something valuable that'll be given away," but what it really means in practice is "no one will work to create something valuable that they'll never be paid for." This can be abstracted further to "in our society people need money to live, and the GNU-ish free software model provides less opportunity for income."
This is an easy argument to provide counter-examples to, but it's not as easy to refute completely. Richard Stallman doesn't make any money from emacs, but he has a salary from MIT and is allowed to devote a substantial amount of his time to FSF projects--effectively, he is being paid to develop free software.
We're often told that the way you make money through open source is support, and indeed here are commercial success stories like Red Hat, Cygnus and GhostScript. GhostScript's income comes primarily from licensing to hardware manufacturers under a non-GPL license. Cygnus' GNUPro toolkit adds "features and innovations that won't make it to the free distributions immediately." Red Hat's revenue stream (and Caldera's, SuSE's, et. al.) is based on the idea that most people want someone else to put together a Linux distribution for them and don't want to spend half their natural life downloading it. In other words, all of those examples have practical reasons why they're successful, even to an open source skeptic.
The $64,000 question is whether this model can be successfully applied to something like Microsoft Word--or any program that's a relatively painless download and install and isn't likely to need much support--if the programmers require an income to continue development and don't have a Microsoft (or even a Red Hat) behind them to provide a salary that's essentially independent of the return the program generates.