Haiku Could Change the World
Linked by Razvan T. Coloja on Mon 3rd Jan 2011 23:30 UTC
BeOS & Derivatives To understand what the BeOS and Haiku operating systems are, we first must remember that BeOS was developed with the multimedia user in mind. BeOS wanted to be what OS X has become today: an easy to use, attractive operating system. However, BeOS was a niche OS, destined for the media-hungry user. The percentage of audio and video applications available for Haiku is greater than the one in Linux, OS X or Windows, and the inner workings of the operating system were created in such a way, that the same multimedia passionate would find it easy to work with the user interface and files. Each application can interfere with other applications of its kind. A WAVE file selection can be dragged from a sound editor and onto the desktop, to create an audio file. Audio applications can interfere with each other via the Haiku Media Kit -- the corespondent of a Linux sound server. Applications like Cortex are a perfect example of how BeOS and Haiku deal with multimedia files: you can have more than one soundcard and use each one of those soundcards independently or separately. You can link one soundcard to the Audio Mixer, start a drum machine application and link that software to the Audio Mixer. If you want to output whatever you create with the audio application, all you have to do is drag the microphone and link it to the application's icon in Cortex.
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Valhalla
Member since:
2006-01-24

the R1 survey they recently did looked like a nice marketing exercise; but strangely, they ended up putting funding in a place from different from where the survey results were telling them).

AFAIK the survey was first made amongst the devs and then extended (by something of a whim) to an open survey. Needless to say that while the overall results would have been interesting reading for the devs, their own internal voting and discussions regarding it is most likely what decides what is prioritized and what is not. Which is as it should be, if the 'community' wants to direct development efforts towards something in particular, bounties is always an possibility.

[And while there may be no official statement of how Haiku is being positioned, the dynamics of the project do seem to point in the direction of a hobby OS.

The main motivation of the Haiku devs have always seemed crystal clear to me, making the desktop OS they themselves want to use. Which is also why this talk of success or failure is pointless, if none other than the devs themselves end up using Haiku then it's still a success.

Undoubtably they would welcome some kind of commercial opportunity to work full time on Haiku, but if that was a major motivator they would have given up years ago. As it stands it would be the icing on the cake.

Reply Parent Score: 2

koki Member since:
2005-10-17

Valhalla,

I understand what you say and even agree with most of it. The point that I was trying to make is simply that Haiku is a developer centric project, not a marketing driven one, and that this is not likely to change (see the statement that I quoted).

Reply Parent Score: 2

Valhalla Member since:
2006-01-24

Valhalla,

I understand what you say and even agree with most of it. The point that I was trying to make is simply that Haiku is a developer centric project, not a marketing driven one, and that this is not likely to change (see the statement that I quoted).

True, but are there any spare-time developed open source projects that are NOT developer centric (meritocracies)? Without the developers the project is dead, marketing on the other hand is not essential although it can be very beneficial.

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