Linked by Kroc Camen on Thu 5th Nov 2009 21:05 UTC
There's no right way to do it, only ideas that are better than others in certain situations. But if you had the opportunity to head up the design of a new OS, one to Put Things Right, one that could be radical enough to varnish out those UI/X bumps that have clung on for years, but practical enough to be used every day, what would you design? How would you handle application management? What about file types and compatibility? Where would you cherry pick the best bits from other OSes and where would you throw away tradition? I've tackled this challenge for myself and present (an unfinished idea): KrocOS (warning: HTML5 site, will display without CSS in IE/older browsers). OSnews Asks: What would make your perfect OS?
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Member since:
2006-01-06
The evidence is staring you in the face, but you don't want to hear it. Why can't the vast majority of distros do something as simple as play DVDs or Blu-Rays without being sued? This is 2009, for chrissakes. How can you possibly call that success?
The primary reason for this failure is the insistence of Linux zealots on having source code for anything they ship. Constantly shifting the ABIs isn't rational, from a development perspective. People claim they want "flexibility", but that's a red herring. What these same folks really want is to create a binary incompatibility such that you would HAVE to have the source code and compile the drivers with that specific version of the kernel in order to have a prayer of working.
Hardware OEMs aren't going to disclose all of their secret sauce to open source developers. Just as they won't share all of their IP with Microsoft. It's not a trust or fairness issue. It's a trade secret and patent issue. If you give away your technological advantages to your competitors, you cease to offer differentiation -- and you die as a commercial entity. Your competitors can leverage and replicate your research without putting in the same level of investment. You know, I'm surprised that so many people in the FOSS community are either blissfully unaware of the realities of this situation -- or simply don't care. Either way, you're shooting yourselves in the foot. It's like you're afraid of success or something, even when people explain step-by-step how you can win.
As for me, I don't care, one way or another. I write commercial software for a living, and the fact of the matter is that, if you guys fail to solve this problem, it just means more business for me. So, by all means continue to ignore what I'm saying. Enrich me, please.
First, OpenSolaris hasn't been open very long. Linux has had more than a decade headstart, and being first means a lot. Some people refer to this as First Mover Advantage. It takes time to write drivers, and there has to be sufficient interest and motivation to target any OS. Second, no slight to OpenSolaris (it's a good OS), but it was derived from Sun's relatively expensive workstation and server OS codebase which didn't use horizontal market hardware. Somebody has to write those drivers. Comparing one form of failure against another is counterproductive.
Edited 2009-11-08 04:46 UTC