SCALE interviews Bruno G. Albuquerque (BGA) and Jorge Mare (Kokito) of the Haiku project. Haiku will be exhibiting and speaking at the 2008 Southern California Linux Expo. SCALE 6x will be held Feb 8 -10 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin. The interview is a tad bit annoying to read due to the (lack of) formatting, but you’ll get through it.
“The primary goal was, and still is, recreate BeOS (R5) from scratch and improve upon it. But the truth is that we already deviated a bit from it as we are already improving over it even before reaching our R1 milestone.”
Will this scope creep delay R1?
[RE the use of MIT licence for Haiku instead of GPL]
BGA: We just base it on the principle that anyone that decides to do that [close Haiku’s source] will have interest on us working on it so they will help us instead of only taking our stuff.
That’s wishful thinking. If anyone ever closes the source as part of a plan to make money, they will then see the free version of Haiku as competition. They will do nothing to help the original project. This is a big part of why the GPL was created in the first place.
On a more positive note… I built Haiku on my R5 box a couple days ago and was very impressed with how far it has come in the past year. It looks beautiful, and it took deliberate effort to crash.