I'm on the fence about whether Be should reverse-engineer the specs. Certainly I can understand why a comapny would only want to do things on the level, using official information about the products. Making commitments to supporting undocumented third party hardware is a nightmare waiting to happen.
It's an issue of priority. It seems like Be is choosing the avenue of doing things right over doing them half-assed. In the linux world, people prefer something that works, even if it barely works, to nothing at all. But linux isn't being sold as a high-performance media OS, and Be hasn't ever been sold on the "do anything with a week to kill and a good usenet feed" model.
Be is also a smallish company, no? Reverse-engineering copywrited code brings up weird legal issues (sure, they could use the linux version, but a reverse engineer of a reverse engineer is likely to be suspect, IMHO), and the smaller a company it is, the harder it's going to be to indemnify. It's not impossible, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not trivial either. If you are looking at code which you don't have a right to use in your product, you have to have an engineer create the specs, from source code or disassembly or whatever. That person is then considered "tainted" with respect to writing non-copywrite-violating code, and care must be taken to doculment that none of the people writing the reverse engineered code have seen the original source or disassembly.
There are a lot of valid reasons for Be not to support G3 machines. And if Apple isn't interested in those hardware sales (i will be building a BeOS machine in the next couple months, for one) then that's their loss.
Actually, I think that there have been only 1 or 2 MacOS viruses in the last few years. Just because it's easy doesn't mean anyone's going to bother...
Slashdot Mirror
"The Evolution of The Computer Ends With Z."
yeah, like Z80?
ah well, it's all TRaSh anyway.
--seamus
While the penguin was announced as a 2.0 mascott at the beginning, there's no plans for a new mascott for linux 3.0
Why the fsck do we need a new mascot?!?!?
it says *no* plans.
the competition was searching for the oldest PC still used in a business.
i didn't know keanu reeves read /.
conform
I'm on the fence about whether Be should reverse-engineer the specs. Certainly I can understand why a comapny would only want to do things on the level, using official information about the products. Making commitments to supporting undocumented third party hardware is a nightmare waiting to happen.
It's an issue of priority. It seems like Be is choosing the avenue of doing things right over doing them half-assed. In the linux world, people prefer something that works, even if it barely works, to nothing at all. But linux isn't being sold as a high-performance media OS, and Be hasn't ever been sold on the "do anything with a week to kill and a good usenet feed" model.
Be is also a smallish company, no? Reverse-engineering copywrited code brings up weird legal issues (sure, they could use the linux version, but a reverse engineer of a reverse engineer is likely to be suspect, IMHO), and the smaller a company it is, the harder it's going to be to indemnify. It's not impossible, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not trivial either. If you are looking at code which you don't have a right to use in your product, you have to have an engineer create the specs, from source code or disassembly or whatever. That person is then considered "tainted" with respect to writing non-copywrite-violating code, and care must be taken to doculment that none of the people writing the reverse engineered code have seen the original source or disassembly.
There are a lot of valid reasons for Be not to support G3 machines. And if Apple isn't interested in those hardware sales (i will be building a BeOS machine in the next couple months, for one) then that's their loss.
conform
Actually, I think that there have been only 1 or 2 MacOS viruses in the last few years. Just because it's easy doesn't mean anyone's going to bother...