Linked by Michael Saunders on Mon 2nd Aug 2004 18:21 UTC
Tired of endless Windows security problems? Intrigued by Linux's power but discouraged by its complexity? Tempted by Mac OS but not thrilled with the hardware cost? If so, you might want to investigate the growing bunch of hobbyist OSes -- Syllable, SkyOS, Haiku, MenuetOS, Visopsys, ReactOS and others. Syllable is perhaps the most promising of them all; it's a maturing open source desktop OS with an evolving kernel & device driver range, and is targeted at the home/small-office user.
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"Is it true that SkyOS or even Syllabe will change their licence agreement, when echieved a certain degre of maturity, to become commercialy closed source products, or is it simply a lack of imagination?"
SkyOS is already closed-source, so it would be pretty hard for us to change from a closed-source model to a closed-source model. Outside of that, we have no plans to change anything in our license as of the time of this writing.
"Howabout just eliminating the top bar completely and trying to figure something else out or place it on the side or whatever just to stand out a bit????"
I can't speak for Syllable here, I'll let them cite their reasons. For SkyOS though, we had a contest to determine which GUI people wanted. Over 40 designs were submitted. Some were duplicates of Windows, some were very different than Windows, and some (like WindUI, what our current GUI is based on) had similar features, but looked different. In the end, this is what was chosen. We had the contest for this exact reason. We did not want to dictate to our users what design they should have. We let them decide. On top of that, SkyOS supports full theming, much like the effect you might get with something like Litestep for Windows (what I mean is, not simply changing colors, but completely re-designing the interface). The WindUI design is what will ship by default. It is close enough to Windows not to scare people, but different enough to make it interesting. Most importantly, it is what the users chose. More than likely, new designs will pop up, and we fully encourage users that would like to try new UI layouts to use these designs.