Submitted by 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.
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.
Yeah I know, and mphipps didn’t really work on the kernel.
AFAIK VM is inside the kernel
Good article! Stabs the drama of Axel
Too bad I live in Indianapolis, Indiana.
I was -born- in Ohio.
Oh well, it’s close enough.
Wait, a Haiku developer lives in Indianapolis? When do you want your free beer? Moe & Johnny’s, Pawn Shop, Mouse Trap, etc. South Broad Ripple ftw. You can redeem on most nights of the week. Seriously.
Yeah. I live and work in Indy. I’ve got a small contingent of people interested in Haiku, but they’re all fence-sitters when it comes to cutting code.
I could go on about how folks who work for consulting firms generally don’t enjoy their work, and so get burnt out very quickly, but I won’t. Not here anyhow.
Between Indy and Columbus, OH there’s a lot of interest.
As for the beer, I’d love to take you up on that. 🙂
I used to live in Ohio too till about a year ago. Now I live in AZ where as far as I know, there are no Be users but myself.
I’m hoping some of the fed up Amiga users will take interest in this as well.
What part of AZ? I used to live in Tucson myself.
I just moved from Tucson to Phoenix.
Just been trying the 27th nightly build in VMWare on Vista. Brings back memories and seems to have basic functionality. Can’t seem to induce folder sharing between VMWare and Vista so this reduces my ability to get some added software into Haiku.
Can’t wait until it’s finished though. I loved BeOS and I’ve been waiting for it’s siucessor for quite sometime. Imagine it coupled with todays computer hardware. Mind Blowing.
Count me in. I live in Sierra Vista, AZ.
Excellent. I agree 100% that Haiku definitely has a niche market (Media) when its released, just as Linux did when it was first released (server).
Haiku will excel at being a fast, responsive Tool. No one said it has to be anything other than that. Choice is good.
Glad to see OSNews caught that story, and some of the faces I remember are here. (hi!)
/c
Yes, Media still are a good niche, but they have that improve the Media Kit, in top quality software, and, of course, the game kit (support for more 3D games)
They’re replicating the OS with the annoyingly deeply nested menus as the primary ui element…
Seriously, why are they not attempting to modernize BeOS rather than rewrite it? It was awesome 10 years ago, now it just looks like a dinosaur.
But good luck anyway.
Queue the typical remarks.. NOW!
Right!!!!! That is Tracker you are talking about, which is easy to replace. They are duplicating a *FIXED* target in OS design because that makes it easy to have programming goals and to know when to go on to the next task.
Guess what? There are replacements already. Using Open-Tracker as a code base people have already written different versions. Crystal-Tracker was nice, but personally I prefer Navi-Tracker.
People like you were are the ones who in the early days of the Glass-Elevator project were all jumping in with diffirent ideas/goals for a BeOS replacement, while claiming that using all the latest ideas would let you deliver long before OpenBeOS/Haiku would be ready.
But with no fixed targets, guess how much use-able code came out of Glass-Elevator in it’s first two years? If you guess none, you were correct.
And there have been others too, but the ones with a lack of fixed goals seemed to all die.