Linked by David Adams on Fri 27th Dec 2002 16:33 UTC, submitted by George N
Nowadays, all you hear about is Windows, MacOS X, or GNU/Linux. However, what ever happened to the good old BeOS?
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Yes, it took Be a long time to get where they got... but they have already done all the hard work! The architecture has been defined, there are well-documented APIs... the work that truly requires skilled engineering has been done. The kernel has already been written and is based on NewOS, so that huge chunk of work is already taken care of. The OpenBeOS team has a perfect 'roadmap' to follow, and what's more they don't have the "chicken and egg" problem of trying to write an OS without having that OS to develop on. They can write each part, and test it on a real live BeOS system to see if it works as expected. That puts them WAY ahead of any other OS project starting from scratch. Plus, a lot of Be's time was originally spent on creating a hardware platform, then porting it to PPC, then porting it to x86, etc... the OpenBeOS team has a clear goal of recreating an OS that is binary- and source-compatible with BeOS, and they have made very clear progress toward that goal. They don't have to worry about stupid "business" stuff like dealing with impatient investors who just want to turn a quick profit.
I agree that it might be a year or two before we have a truly working version of OpenBeOS... but frankly, I cannot wait until that day. Go OBOS!!!! (And variants thereof...
I too say my little OBOS prayer every night. But I *DO* think it will happen.