Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 23rd Oct 2008 19:58 UTC, submitted by FreeGamer
It seems like only yesterday when due to a combination of hubris, bad business decisions, and pressure from Apple and Microsoft, Be, Inc. went under, with its assets - including the BeOS - bought up by Palm, who now store it in a filing cabinet somewhere in the attic of the company's Sunnyvale headquarters. Right after Be went under, the OpenBeOS project was started; an effort to recreate the BeOS as open source under the MIT license. This turned out to be a difficult task, and many doubted the project would ever get anywhere. We're seven years down the road now, and the persistence is paying off: the first Haiku alpha is nearer than ever.
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Member since:2005-06-29
I suspect that if Haiku wasn't concerned with binary and source comparability then they would have released something much earlier. And don't forget that (moving forwards) Linux continues to grow in code size and complexity. I think once Haiku is out there we'll start to see faster progress.
Member since:2005-07-06
Yeah, but seven years. It took them seven years just to hit almost alpha and the main requirement for the alpha was to be compatible with ten or more year old technology. A goal they have still not completely reached!
Looking at only the number intervening years doesn't paint the most accurate picture. For one, it doesn't tell you anything about the current rate of development. For another, it misses the fact that 3rd party developers have been able to keep even plain 'ol R5 reasonably up-to-date, because the OS makes it (relatively) simple to provide drop-in replacements for major components even without access to the source.
More, it isn't until the second release that Haiku expects to update the code to add functionality and catch up with the last seven years.
But in that time, what new indispensable OS technologies were introduced - but are missing from Haiku? To me, at least, that's much more significant than the number of years that have passed.
It's also not as cut-and-dry as "BeOS was not developed for 7 years, therefore it must have 7 years worth of catching-up to do." Especially since it's taken that long for most OSes to catch up to things that were already present in BeOS circa 2001.
And all this is operating on the assumption bringing Haiku up to date will be faster than it took to be compatible with the moribund BeOS. There is no guarantee this is true. And every reason in the world (based on past releases of other software) to believe the release will take longer than anyone thinks it should.
But that's assuming, in turn, that's there is a monumental amount of work that will be needed order to bring Haiku up-to-date. I don't think that's the case, at least not without interpreting "up-do-date" to mean "identical to Linux."
Considering all the above, why wouldn't Linux be quite user friendly by the time Haiku is ready for prime time? Even at its current slow pace...
In a nutshell? I think it boils down to perception - most advocates of BeOS / Haiku don't necessarily perceive Linux as "like Haiku, but better," but rather view them as two fundamentally different OSes.
To resort to an analogy: if you're someone who prefers road bikes, you're not going to see a mountain bike as an interchangeable substitute - no matter how awesome it is.
Member since:
2005-08-07
StephenBeDoper posted...
Yeah, but seven years. It took them seven years just to hit almost alpha and the main requirement for the alpha was to be compatible with ten or more year old technology. A goal they have still not completely reached! More, it isn't until the second release that Haiku expects to update the code to add functionality and catch up with the last seven years.
And all this is operating on the assumption bringing Haiku up to date will be faster than it took to be compatible with the moribund BeOS. There is no guarantee this is true. And every reason in the world (based on past releases of other software) to believe the release will take longer than anyone thinks it should.
Considering all the above, why wouldn't Linux be quite user friendly by the time Haiku is ready for prime time? Even at its current slow pace...
--bornagainpenguin
PS: I'm glad you thought my other points were valid.