Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 27th Mar 2008 22:29 UTC, submitted by koki
As posted recently in the Haiku blogs, the April 2008 issue of the Japanese publication Software Design Magazine carries an article titled 'Writing Haiku: Begun in 2001, an open source replication of BeOS finally nears its alpha release' in its Pacific Connections series written by Bart Eisenberg. This is an eight pages long article that includes a full interview of Axel Dorfler, as well as comments from Bryan Varner (Haiku Java Port team lead) and Dane Scott, of TuneTracker fame. Go ahead and check out the English version of the article.
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Member since:
2006-05-26
I don't know whether this was originally written in English (seems likely) and then translated to Japanese, but if the Japanese is as good as the English version, they did very well, and it covers a lot of good details. However, there are a couple minor points it got wrong:
1. The name was switched from OpenBeOS to Haiku not for the purpose of copyright, but rather the issue of trademark issues: you can name any application anything you want, or book, or something similar under copyright laws, but the name "BeOS" itself was trademarked, and you can't reuse the same thing (or something too close) in the same field, which OpenBeOS was clearly in violation of that, assuming anyone cared.
2. Wait a minute, when did Bryan Varner move to Ohio from Indianapolis??? He currently lives in the same neighborhood I used to live in, about 1/4 mile away from where I lived (I now live in Microsoft's front/backyard).
Other than that, a very good article that showcases a lot of the issues that have happened and do happen in the real life drama of OSS development, especially for something as complex as re-creating something binary-compatible (mostly) to a sufficiently complex existing OS that has software that runs on it.