A handfull of well known –to the BeOS community– developers have come together to create a new OS, which starts where BeOS left off. Bear in mind that this OS, named Sequel, is not a BeOS clone, but a brand new OS which adds new things in the mix while retains the best features found on BeOS and other OSes. The OS is closed source and it is in early stages: it currently boots off a floppy and has a shell. Editor’s note: I am part of the small team, since its first days, a few months ago. I designed part of the UI for this OS, but I am looking forward to get a working GUI system before I dive in and do some “real” work on the UI and usability. Stay tuned for more news about Sequel in the future. UPDATE: Please note that this is NOT “my” project. I merely help out the guys on the UI, and nothing more. UPDATE 2: March 2003: I have resigned of my role on Sequel.
Group is Working on a BeOS ‘Sequel’
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
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Sounds amazing, and excellent idea! I’m a big fan of those GUI mockups that you do every now and then, and if Sequel is anywhere near the quality of those and of the original BeOS, this should be great. Can’t want to hear more about it
the URL works perfectly for me. Try with another browser/ISP…
!. Multi-user. To me, this was BeOS’s biggest downfall, bigger even than the shoddy hardware support.
2. Nanokernel multiserver. One can dream, I suppose.
It’s good to get back to making something, isn’t it? There’s been a lot of good discussion on the ROX mail list which you’ve probably picked up. They’re doing good stuff as well. One way or another, OS technology is going to the next level of utility. The time for cloning Microsoft/Apple is over and the path to innovation is being walked more frequently every day.
In terms of pure technology, it looks like more and more people are at home building cool stuff. It’s not hard to understand why when the US and Israel are pushing for armageddon in the Middle East and the US is sliding further and further into recession.
Perhaps on the other side of the depression in the world there will be a new age of amazing software that does neat stuff to make our lives better.
–ms
This looks quite interesting, Eugenia. I must ask-is this meant to be a project OS, or is this meant to be a commercial product?
I second the first suggestion -mainly because a lot of users aren’t single users on a machine. In a corporate enviroment, this is hell, to say the least. At families, I can imagine fights on little things like wallpaper and stuff. Not asking for UNIX kind of scalable multiuser enviroment where 20,000 of your warez buddies can join, but something enough support for most desktop users.
Another thing is I want optimization. Everything but the responsiveness and the boot/shut down speed is rather slow in comparison with other modern OS especially Linux. This includes file system speed, memory management speed, etc. Optimization wouldn’t hurt, only help.
And yet another thing is to pick a good marketing team. Unless this whole project is for non-profit, something I doubt for a closed source OS, expect to fall right on your face without a good marketing team. Remember, marketing isn’t merely about advertising or PR, but is trying to meet the needs of your target market in order to win them over.
So, now all I have to do is have a dinner party with my friends and laugh at your silly attempts …
Don’t go to the extreme of Aqua for eye candy. I don’t mind eye candy, if it doesn’t get in the way. And BeOS icons- I like them a lot. Don’t get rid of them. make the egdes smooth, and remove dithering – it would be great. Add a subtle touch of color gradients – it would be perfect.
Speaking of GUI, I would like to suggest a vector-based GUI as oppose to raster on BeOS, like Quartz or Fresco. This would be very beneficial in the future. I’m not going to type all the benefits here again, so read it up here:
>It’s good to get back to making something, isn’t it?
I designed Sequel’s UI widgets many months ago. I am currently waiting to get a toolkit and a windowing server before I go any further with it…
>this meant to be a project OS, or is this meant to be a commercial product?
It will be both a project geek OS, and if it flies, it flies and becomes commercial. If not, it will stay a geek/hobby OS. I mean, it takes MANY years to create a usable commercial OS. So, for the time being, it will just remain a good hobby for us, so don’t expect too much. I mean, it is really a hobby for the time being.
>Don’t go to the extreme of Aqua for eye candy.
Don’t worry, I am not an extremist. I am for simplicity and elegance.
>Speaking of GUI, I would like to suggest a vector-based GUI as oppose to raster on BeOS
We are already thinking of it.
So here are they
Alpha Transperancy.
In raster-based GUIs, normally what they do is to capture the background and blend it in the foreground – quasi alpha transperancy. Which is the reason why alpha transperancy on Windows XP isn’t as good as those on OS X. You would save a lot of RAM and VRAM with vector too.
Resolution Independant
For me, this would be rather important in the future, and even now. In todays tense, just say you are doing a presentation, your laptop monitor has a resolution of 1024×768. It is rather cumbersom if your LCD projector has 800×600 resolution – the screen don’t scale as nice unto the screen.
Using vector isn’t of raster on the other hand would allow the screen, and widgets, objects and texts to scale perfectly well so what you see on your laptop is what you see on the screen (most of the time).
>So, now all I have to do is have a dinner party with my friends and laugh at your silly attempts …
[To those who don’t know, Sikosis is reffering sarcastically to my recent comment about OBOS]
Yes, you can. Have all the laugh you want.
But there is a big difference: We never promised anything to anybody. We never said we need a beos clone ASAP and at the end of the year you will have an alpha. We are not the OS of the “people”. We do it as a hobby for us, and for us alone, and we never got into responsbilities like OBOS has, which lets a whole community to wait for the OBOS release as the “perfect BeOS clone”. Sequel is nothing like it and we promise NOTHING to ANYBODY. There is this difference my friend…
This sounds awesome! when you have a beta out Iad definately like to test!
…I used the BeOS Developer Edition a short time ago and really liked it. I was a little disappointed in some things, mainly hardware support… but given BeOS is basically dead and I was using open-source drivers for a commercially dead OS, I was pretty pleased with it.
It would be great to have some sort of… amalagram of Windows, OS X and BeOS interface ideas. The biggest short coming of Linux to someone inexperienced is both ease-of-use as well as the lack of “polish”, which is just coming around.
There are also various WMs, and bugs in XFree86 and such… I hope that ‘Sequel’ will stick to ONE original WM and not recreate the work done by Gnome or KDE or anyone else — which are just far too “clunky” in my opinion.
The hardest part will probably be hardware support. With closed development going on, I hope this will get more support from hardware vendors than Linux has been getting.
Best of luck to all of you — I’ll be keeping my eye on this.
that’s supposed to be “I’d”…*slowly walks away*
Guys,
Well Have fun! But one thing I can’t stress enough. Have fun and make something that will make people jaws drop. Don’t worry about what others think along the way. Personaly I think up till now you have done things they way they should be done. In secret. It’s always easier to work like this and then show it all the the world. Then they can’t bug you when it will be done, or what’s happening or go nuts over how your doing something.
I hope you make something that is truely differant but yet still familure in a way. Also I’m glad your taking the commerial approach from a hobby project. This will only make your project stronger and smoother.
Personally, my favorite GUIs are BeOS and Photon from QNX. I really am a big fan of the simple look. Aqua is fine, but it sort of gets in your way, you know? The same is true with Luna.
Anyway, can you give anykind of glimpse of your work thus far? What do the widgets look like? Can you give some kind of idea of what you expect it to look like?
(I understand that this is still very early, so you may not have anything to show yet. So I’m really not expecting anything.)
I’m really excited about this. Can’t wait to see more.
While a developer is free to choose the license that she wants I question a closed source BeOS “sequel”. Does the closed source BeOS not show what happens if the baby dies? It literally disappears. Would BeOS had been open source, there would not be any need to start out of nothing now. I for myself will not investigate time and affort in another closed source OS anymore where I have to sent a prayer every night that it should be alive next morning (not that I had ever sent a prayer ;-). I can develop for the Windows(R) market if I want to sell. For my passion I need to have it open source.
Regards.
I am more and more worried about the number of BeOs followers and the consequent dispersion of efforts and I can’t help thinking of what all those people could do if they united.
Hopefully, it doesn’t end up with several unusable Oses…
Sorry if it sounds a bit pessimistic…
For now, Sequel will be closed source. However, if interest of the developers dies, or whatever, I am sure Frans WILL open source it. As he did just a week ago with his other application, SampleStudio. He got tired/no-time of developing it, and he open sourced it. Sequel will remain closed, until something like “lack of interest” or something similar happens, and then I am sure Frans and the rest of the guys will decide to take the open source route. The group is not “against” open source, they are just not for it at *this time*. If Sequel becomes an “opportunity”, we better have the upper hand. If not, we might just well open it. But the time to do or decide just that, hasn’t come yet. The OS is still in its infancy, a lot of things will need to be developed first before it becomes even interesting for OSS developers…
Or.. Yet Another Geek OS..
as long as the geek factor overrules the user factor, this OS is doomed before it even sees the light.
Starting with “we’ll see where it ends” is not a good starting point. Either you go full-out for a commercial/consumer OS, or you stay nitpicking around with kernel code, and become just another item on the pile of total useless playthings.
People seem to forget that when linux was incarnated, the whole computer community was different, things like that (student writing nice kernel, which becomes immensely popular) don’t happen anymore.
Without either funding or Open Sourcing (parts of) the code, this project will be yago…
Yet another OS?
“The hardest part will probably be hardware support. With closed development going on, I hope this will get more support from hardware vendors than Linux has been getting. ”
Sign a couple NDAs in some cases. Throw a little cash in others, and problems like that seem to disappear.
>this OS is doomed before it even sees the light
Doomed for what??? For my hobby time? It is mine to spend and burn!
We are not planning overthrowing Microsoft my dear. Please get the facts right.
>Yet another OS?
Yes, got a problem with that? We already have hundrends of them, why one more would hurt? This OS is still in its INFANCY, it is a development experiement SO FAR. Nobody said that it is ready to replace your Windows (and it won’t be for a long time).
closed source? you haven’t learnt anything…
Why must people perpetually be so negative these days? Is it no longer allowable to do something for fun? Does every pet project have to have future goals of world domination? Relax, people.
first “Nanokernel multiserver”… what the heck is that? and why would it be useful?
second, Eugenia and coders of Sequel, good luck. Whatever the others say, this is about having fun and entertaining yourself (read hobby) and you should keep it that way, even if you do want to pursue commercial interests. best of luck.
p.s. oh, and i have to say it… can we see screenshots?
>can we see screenshots?
Currently it is just a command line, text-based OS. We have mockups, but I personally opposed to the idea of releasing them, because of competition reasons. We need to differentiate from the rest, and having 10 kiddies stealing the looks from the mockups and creating Windows and Linux skins for their graphical servers, while we haven’t still implementing ours, it just not logical and it will be bad for “business”… 😉
>Anyway, can you give anykind of glimpse of your work thus >far? What do the widgets look like? Can you give some >kind of idea of what you expect it to look like?
We can not show it now, but you can expect a clean but good looking GUI.
>am more and more worried about the number of BeOs >followers and the consequent dispersion of efforts and I >can’t help thinking of what all those people could do if >they united.
Please do not worry. If you want an answer on what happens when all those people join, head over to the OpenBeOS or Linux department.
>While a developer is free to choose the license that she >wants I question a closed source BeOS “sequel”. Does the >closed source BeOS not show what happens if the baby >dies? It literally disappears.
We decided to keep it closed for any NDA problems we might run into in the future if we contact 3th parties. We will also release/sell it with a license that covers this subject. We will allow people to get a copy of the source if we would drop for any reason.
>Or.. Yet Another Geek OS..
Please, please,..
If we were to create a Geek OS, we would have open sourced.
But there is a big difference: We never promised anything to anybody. We never said we need a beos clone ASAP and at the end of the year you will have an alpha. We are not the OS of the “people”. We do it as a hobby for us, and for us alone, and we never got into responsbilities like OBOS has, which lets a whole community to wait for the OBOS release as the “perfect BeOS clone”. Sequel is nothing like it and we promise NOTHING to ANYBODY. There is this difference my friend…
Hehehe! Reading this I had a visual flashback of Homer J. Simpson saying to Lisa (I hope I remember the words correctly): “Trying is the first step to failing.”
Of course, if you keep your goals as low as possible it is easy to “succeed”. Having to stretch to reach your goal keeps you on your toes.
I’m a bit puzzled by this decision, supposed to be enforced only “initially”. What are the negative experiences the article is referring to? Is it true that this is only an initial step and the source code will be opened later?
One thing for sure: I won’t NEVER ever again tie myself to a proprietary operating systesm again (the history of Amiga and BeOS should be an adequate lesson to all of us).
Rehdon
just don’t forget to throw tid bits out to us every now and then.
Personal two-cents: ignore portability and aim high. Don’t worry about people being able to run their systems on their current hardware…or on even more outdated hardware. Go for an OS that takes advantage of what’s going to be BIG tomorrow not yesterday. An IA-64 specific (or other 64-bit) OS would rock!
Everyone upgrades…build to a particular spec and when people upgrade they’ll get something compatible. Spending time on compatibility is a pain and you run into the driver problems. As you say, it takes years to get something like this going so remember that…in a few years, 64-bit multi-processor systems won’t be unusual and you’ll have one OS that can really scream since it was designed from the ground up for 64-bits.
So, think hardware too — what should a Sequel Machine be??!!! BeBox, Amiga, NeXT, original Apples — nice symbiotic relationships between hardware and software that represented the FUTURE. Take full advantage of commodity hardware but concentrate on the best of it and focus on depth of relationship rather than breadth.
Be bold.
Ignore the naysayers (and soothsayers…remember Asterix and the Soothsayer).
Ignore those that fear your independence.
Ignore those that fear taking a new path.
Go for the gold…if you don’t, you probably won’t even place.
Hmm, since you are doing this closed source and thinking of maybe going commercial you’re not tinkering with Linux. Hmm, what could it be?
I sort of assumed it was some kind of BSD, since Eugenia has been quite supportive of FreeBSD lately.
will there be a free (as in no money) trial version for powerpc?
if not, is there a chance of the code being opened to selected developers for the purposes of porting?
We decided to keep it closed for any NDA problems we might run into in the future if we contact 3th parties.
this is a problem for me: NDA & 3rd parties implies that you’ll be charging money for this OS. this would make it difficult if you chose to open the source later, if you lose interest. i understand how this will shorten your time-to-market, but please consider a dual license! Trolltech seem to be having no problem with their license for Qt: free (GPL) on linux and commercial on all other platforms.
What’s the point of doing so many projects which actually do all the same thing. Wouldn’t it be wiser to invest time in one or two projects?
So now we have:
OBOS: http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/news.php
Blue Eyed OS: http://www.blueeyedos.com/
VOS: http://www.geocities.com/jasonv118/vos/
Cosmo: http://www.cosmoe.com/
Leonardo now named Sequel:http://www.xentronix.com/
Zeta:http://www.yellowtab.com
Who’s next?
Some research shows me that both
Frans Van Nispen (the guy from xentronix)
Massimiliano Origgi (the guy from Leonardo)
Both also work on Blue Eyed OS or at least are contributing members of this OS.
This makes me think that the OS they are creating is based on a Linux kernel and that they are thinking along the lines of Blue Eyed OS.
The involvement of Eugenia is what I find the most bizar, hasn’t she be critizing all these BeOS projects before. And no I don’t believe it’s just a hobby OS, if so you wouldn’t post it on OSNEWS, coz in that case you wouldn’t care if someone knew about it and there wouldn’t be a company(Xentronix) behind it. And of course it wouldn’t be closed source either.
I only believe all these efforts come a little too late, by the time it’s finished the OS world will be entirely different coz in 5 years a lot can change.
I think it’s pretty clever to have her on the team, coz you can better have her working with you than against you if you want to make the headlines of OSNEWS in a positive way. Well never underestimate the bussiness sence of a Dutch fellow 😉
>What’s the point of doing so many projects which actually do all the same thing
People don’t always agree on how to do things. So, they create their own thing. What more… natural?
>The involvement of Eugenia is what I find the most bizar, hasn’t she be critizing all these BeOS projects before.
Not in the way you think. For me, and **I speak solely for myself**, Sequel is a hobby.
I ONLY critisized some other BeOS-related projects that are “serious” on getting marketshare and “replacing” BeOS. When it comes to hobbies and development experiements, I ENDORSE the idea of creating OSes just for the fun of it or for researching purposes. What I loath, is the dis-illusion some people have that they could take down Microsoft with their half-booting OS, or their illusion that they can have in 2 years the same results that of a highly paid engineers had in 10 years. When you DON’T have these illusions, and when you do your OS for the fun of it or for research, I SUPPORT you.
>And no I don’t believe it’s just a hobby OS, if so you wouldn’t post it on OSNEWS
Are you new over here? OSNews POSTS about hobby OSes ALL the time!
>coz in that case you wouldn’t care if someone knew about it and there wouldn’t be a company(Xentronix) behind it.
I simply respected the wishes of some of the Sequel developers who felt that their project is not far along the development road to get mentioned. When they felt that they were ready, then -and only then- I posted the news. There is nothing “mystical” or “secretive” about it, stop speculating please.
Closed source? Has that any potential of surviving in a market place that is dominated by MS Windows? You would think that the BeOS comunity would have figured that one out.. Make it opensource (linux, freebsd,..), or create a complete package of hardware, software and support (apple, sun). (although I don’t think the latter is possible in the current economic climat)
1) Dedicated to a target audience – This is where I believe Microsoft do so well, Windows was geared towards an “audience group” for along time, Windows 95 was known as the home and small office use edition, WinNT for large office networks etc. Building your OS with a target audience fixed squarely in mind will help with this.
2) EASY, a computer newbie should be able to pick it up with very little training (I think thats why the Atari ST was so popular, along with Amiga, people fell inlove with those very easy to use, yet powerful interfaces.. You didn’t need a MENSA IQ to use them).
3) If the OS is meant for home use, you had better support what the home user wants to do.. i.e GAMING, You better have something like 3D hardware accelerated graphics, sound, input etc. all sorted out, basically making a DirectX style API for developers thats standardized.
4) Web features – Yup, it’s important now to have support for every type of webpage that IE can load – shockwave flash support, Java support etc. Joe User doesn’t like seeing a webpage that doesn’t “load correctly”, if he gets too many of those, he’s going back to an OS that he knows works.. it’s a fact.
5) EASY networking setup, Windows is incredibly easy to get networked for those great LAN bashs of Duke3D etc.
6) no scripting! – Newbies see Linux / BSD as scripting HELL, too many scripts to get their computer to even remotely start doign what they want to achieve… Unlike Windows that has an autoexec.bat and a config.sys that you MAY use IF you want to etc. Scripting is powerful, yes, but it’s not for the masses i’m afraid.
Well, thats my 10cents worth anyway, I think if someone creates a powerful OS with the majority of this stuff, then it has a chance of living in a mass-user home environment
G’Luck to all those who try
>Leonardo now named Sequel:http://www.xentronix.com/
Sequel is NOT Leonardo ! Sequel is completely new.
>Zeta:http://www.yellowtab.com
Zeta IS BeOS R6 with a big part of the Be Inc sources, so this is NOT an attempt to recreate BeOS, it is BeOS.
>Frans Van Nispen (the guy from xentronix)
>Massimiliano Origgi (the guy from Leonardo)
>
>Both also work on Blue Eyed OS or at least are >contributing members of this OS.
>
>This makes me think that the OS they are creating is >based on a Linux kernel and that they are thinking along >the lines of Blue Eyed OS.
I have indeed contributed sourcecode to BlueOS, but I contributed the same code to OpenBeOS. The source involved covered a big part of the GUI widgets. BlueOS used it fairly, OpenBeOS fucked up the sources and did it all over again.
Basing an OS on a Linux kernel, in my opinion, is creating a new Linux layer (Desktop) and people will always see it as Linux. The Linux kernel IS Linux.
As over a year after my contribution to the OpenBeOS they only managed to mess up my sources, rip off my name from them and not manage to create a single extra class, I lost my hopes on that one.
>The involvement of Eugenia is what I find the most bizar, >hasn’t she be critizing all these BeOS projects before.
Eugenia happens to be a great GUI designer by profession. An we need a great GUI.
>I only believe all these efforts come a little too late, >by the time it’s finished the OS world will be entirely >different coz in 5 years a lot can change.
I would like to stress this again:
WE ARE NOT, in contradiction to the other projects mentioned, recreating BeOS !
We are creating a NEW OS with some ideas of BeOS. It will neither be 100% source nor binary compatible, these are NOT our goals.
>way. Well never underestimate the bussiness sence of a >Dutch fellow 😉
Thanks.
>As over a year after my contribution to the OpenBeOS they >only managed to mess up my sources, rip off my name from >them and not manage to create a single extra class, I lost >my hopes on that one.
Uhm, I can clearly see your name here:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/open-beos/current/sr…
and here:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/open-beos/current/sr…
Just to say two classes.
And tell me, BScrollBar, BPolygon, BShape, BTabView, BButton, BBox, BCheckBox, just to say some, are not BeOS interface kit classes? And these have been checked in by different people than you, so they didn’t “mess up” your sources.
So, please, don’t say erroneous things.
As over a year after my contribution to the OpenBeOS they only managed to mess up my sources, rip off my name from them and not manage to create a single extra class, I lost my hopes on that one.
You speak of your tiny widget stuff, not the OBOS effort, right? Else, I’d like to see the reactions of e.g. Axel Dörfler and Ingo Weinhold, who’ve been slaving away extremely successfully on multiple fronts, when you insult them face to face…
>And tell me, BScrollBar, BPolygon, BShape, BTabView, >BButton, BBox, BCheckBox, just to say some, are not BeOS >interface kit classes? And these have been checked in by >different people than you, so they didn’t “mess up” your >sources.
I have given them (1,5 years ago), the complete working sources of those and more classes. I gave the same to BlueEyed OS, they can confirm this.
As you say, they are checked in by different people AFTER mine were added. So they did mess up. After a few mails with the staff they tried to get back as much as they could and added my name to the contributors.
I would NOT say anything bad about Axel Dörfler nor Ingo Weinhold, they are doing a tremendous job.
My point is mainly:
Having a big team off developers with skills ranking from none to a very high level, which I believe there are people with high skills on the OBOS project, does NOT mean you will have a project that is viable, nor that it can be developed faster.
I, and many others, believe that in the case of OBOS it has worked against them on many levels. A lot of the good and better coders left the project for that very reason.
I have no hard feelings agains the OBOS project, I even think they do a great job on some parts.
Our opinion on the needed skills to be able to work on crucial parts of an OS is just different.
Well, at least now people do have a reason to criticize Eugenia whenever she posts about BeOS – she works on a competing BeOS-ripoff project.
And since she has been working on that for some time now, I wonder if the recent flames by her directed at YellowTAB and OpenBeOS were in part because she wanted to make the competition look bad…
Naughty, naughty Eugy
Honestly though, can you give us a 100% guarantee that your opinions on ANY OS in the future will not be influenced by the fact that you yourself are working on a (commercial) closed-source one?
Sequel is NOT a competiting BeOS replacement project !!!!
Eugenia does some GUI design for it in here spare time, and she even flames us about things when appropriate.
Sequel is nothing like it and we promise NOTHING to ANYBODY.
And as was pointed out time and again when you previously made your comments, OpenBeos had never (at that time) promised anything to anybody.
Adam
… I have no use for it. I have no desire to be strung along with a closed source OS, like BeOS, only to be abandonned by the developers when they see fit to move on to something else.
Adam
>Having a big team off developers with skills ranking from none to a very high level, which I believe there are people >with high skills on the OBOS project, does NOT mean you will have a project that is viable, nor that it can be >developed faster
The point is very simple: if there is NO ONE working at a given class, is it better that someone which isn’t so good starts working on it, or that no one works on it?
>I , and many others, believe that in the case of OBOS it has worked against them on many levels. A lot of the good >and better coders left the project for that very reason.
A lot ?
I count you, David and Ithamar.
AFAIR David left basically because Marcus fixed a bug in his code and he couldn’t stand it. About you and Ithamar, I don’t know why you left.
Does this project has any relation with the Syllable OS? Could you please tell us more about its background? Great to know it’s closed sourced, ‘hate all opensource preaching like if it were the seventh wonder.
Where is the GUI heading? something like this http://www.geocities.com/imsniper/index.html#Concept , or is it a different UI approach? Thanks
Futher evidence that Sequel is not a BeOS clone beunited.org has removed any trace of Sequel/X-OS from our OSBOS standards site as per request of Frans and his team. We wish them all the best.
Simon Gauvin,
President, beuntied.org
http://www.beunited.org
>I’m a bit puzzled by this decision, supposed to be >enforced only “initially”. What are the negative
> experiences the article is referring to?
yes, i am also very interested in the topic. I can easily imagine lots of personal factors contributing to the decision of this group of people to leave OBOS, but i would like to know whether there are also more general, technical, reasons related to the very nature of OSS.
Personally, i am always stunned by how much people can disagree about what should be a purely empirical problem (OS designing). Wildly different abilities in open teams have already been mentioned, but i also suspect other three factors are involved:
1. lack of knowledge of the EXACT issue at hand. Even worse, programmers are often convinced that they know how a certain program works when they actually don’t. I have often noticed that very experienced programmers think they know a piece of software only because they worked on a similar problem. That’ s wrong, of course, knowing about the PROBLEM does not mean you know the SOLUTION that other programmers have come up with. X is a typical example: many developers have firm ideas of how a GUI should be implemented, but very few know they way around the X sources …
2. confusing bugs or bad features with bad design. Even if my background is in natural language processing and the only computer language i am comfortable in is Scheme, i understand fairly well that real-world programming has lots of other factors to consider than good design. A messy programme that works is much better than any half implemented well-designed one (sometimes, sometimes not). From this point of view, you never throw away a really big chunk of code, you fix it (if possible). The point here is that any real world programme needs lots of FIXING (as opposed to simple bug-tracking). I suspect that a negative consequence of the OSS development model is that many developers now think that the only way to make something work is to reimplement it from scratch. Although this is certainly a very laudable attitude it is not always possible to do so in the real world. The example, again, is X. Everybody hates it, everybody tries to write a replacement, but how many working replacements do we have?
3. This is perhaps a consequence of the last point. It seems to me that very few people read other people’s code. That is incredible, given the millions of code floating on the internet, but i think is true. I am not a developer, but i started using linux since 1992, and i very well remember studying shell scripts and C source files to hours, just to try to understand how the whole thing works.
Is such a thing still done nowadays?
i would like to hear the opinion of real developers on these topics.
fred
> 1. Multi-user. To me, this was BeOS’s biggest downfall, bigger even than the shoddy hardware support.
I wouldn’t place multiuser at top priority… anyway OpenBeOs will go there anyway someday…
> 2. Nanokernel multiserver. One can dream, I suppose.
Tried GNU Hurd ?
(me->TodoLost()->Additem(“try Hurd”);)
> I second the first suggestion -mainly because a lot of users aren’t single users on a machine. In a corporate enviroment, this is hell, to say the least
corporates leaved for years with the FAKE “multiuser” windows 95/98…
> Optimization wouldn’t hurt, only help.
Yes but remember optimizations can’t make a badly designed thing work nice
> >Speaking of GUI, I would like to suggest a vector-based GUI as oppose to raster on BeOS
> We are already thinking of it.
After display-postscript and display-PDF, what about display-SVG ?
> If we were to create a Geek OS, we would have open sourced.
FreeBSD, a Geek OS ???
> Why so many projects doing the same thing?
They are NOT doing the same thing:
So now we have:
OBOS -> recreate BeOS as Free Software, with its own kernel and start from it.
Blue Eyed OS -> recreate BeOS using Linux as the kernel.
VOS -> ugh, looks to me as a window manager :p
Cosmo -> any one knows ?
Sequel -> a “pet” OS project (nothing negative here).
Zeta -> it _IS_ BeOS, as Frans already corrected.
We should also add GlassElevator, which is the “Sequel” to OpenBeOS
> >And no I don’t believe it’s just a hobby OS, if so you wouldn’t post it on OSNEWS
>Are you new over here? OSNews POSTS about hobby OSes ALL the time!
Indeed, OsNews even posts about Windows
))))
> 6) no scripting! – Newbies see Linux / BSD as scripting HELL, too many scripts to get their computer to even remotely start doign what they want to achieve… Unlike Windows that has an autoexec.bat and a config.sys that you MAY use IF you want to etc. Scripting is powerful, yes, but it’s not for the masses i’m afraid.
s/MAY/HAVE TO/
You’re very lucky if you never had to touch your config.sys / autoexec.bat…
Btw, BeOS does this just fine IMO, it has very powerful scripting abilities (even for GUI apps),
but the user doesn’t need to know about them first, then learns it progressively.
Frans Van Nispen wrote:
[i]As you say, they are checked in by different people AFTER mine were added. So they did mess up. After a few mails with the staff they tried to get back as much as they could and added my name to the contributors. [i]
I am no longer a part of the OpenBeOS project, but a lot of my code has been checked in by other people.
I can’t believe all this instant know-it-alls and naysaying. People like Eugenia and Frans are trying to do something worthwhile, something they enjoy and get bashed for it. What’s wrong with it being closed source? At this point, it sounds like they just want to work with each other, have fun and not have to worry about the massive gridlock of OSS. Give them a break and be happy for them, that they’re doing something they enjoy. And besides, if it was open source from the beginning, you can’t really go back. But, if it’s closed source from the beginning, then it could become open source at some point if the situation changed. as Eugenia said. Good thinking, I say! And best of luck!
And you people who say, “Another OS?” Well, why are you here then at OS News?? 🙂
Does this project has any relation with the Syllable OS?
Not that I’m aware! Syllable is mostly under the GPL and LGPL, so it would be impossible for Sequel to be based on Syllable sources. The only link between us is that Eugenia offered some comments and mockups to improve the Syllable widgets, and Frans posted a couple of comments to the Syllable-Developer mailing list a little while ago.
P.S: Syllable 0.4.3 is planed for release in about a week…
Yahoo, another closed source OS. Well, hope you guys have fun anyway.
>> 2. Nanokernel multiserver. One can dream, I suppose.
>Tried GNU Hurd ?
Yes, and I think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Okay, it needs some more time in the oven. But I’m quite encouraged by what I see so far. And gnumach isn’t a nanokernel by any strech of the imagination. I’d say that it’s questionably a microkernel. 🙂 But the work on L4 sounds promising….I’m itching for it to see the light of day.
>(me->TodoLost()->Additem(“try Hurd”);)
Do it today. You only need a 1.5g partition. It’ll use your existing linux swap space. The tarball is only about 20MB, iirc. If you’ve got a fast connection, download Philip Charles’ most excellent snapshot CD’s. Those will give you an idea of what it does, and where it’s going.
The real interesting stuff, though, is in the cvs sources. They’re easy to get, but not that easy to compile sometimes.
Elver Loho: And since she has been working on that for some time now, I wonder if the recent flames by her directed at YellowTAB and OpenBeOS were in part because she wanted to make the competition look bad…
Funny that Eugenia’s flames are 100% true (for example, YellowTab’s unprofessionalism… just go to the last Zeta-related thread). She is one person that doesn’t change her opinion though matter what.
Meanwhile, I don’t think naysaying the competition is anywhere clever – it is 100% stupid – it is bound to fall back right on your face. In addition of loosing respect she had built up over time. And if Eugenia doesn’t know that, well I’m telling you, someone kidnapped her and replaced her…
Meanwhile, from what I understand: Sequel IS NOT a replacement project for BeOS, unlike OBOS and Zeta. In other words, she may as well also start bad-mouthing all her competition, especially Amiga, if that was indeed her objective.
Just to start with it is really sad to see where BeOS community has gone. People should first read every comment, then think everythink they read and then make a statement. And they should stop critisizing anyone. (Sorry for my bad english).
I used OS/2 for 5 years and BeOS for 3 years and I am afraid (a bit) to use an OS just to see it go away. But I HAVE to, since all the alternatives are just not good enough. The more there are the better. As I see it, all BeOS projects, if the ‘ll succed to their goals, will be better than any other OS there is. If I liked the rest I would use them and not BeOS.
Want to think if there is a place for another one? Look around you. You think that this is loss of resources? Then you should grab a gun and kill all Linux developers that gave so much just to make a toy OS, Linux, the thing it is today. If they gave less than that to windows programming, windows would be the best OS there is. But they didn’t want to and this is their time and efforts.
Try to show respect to other people. If you think someone is bad (in any manner) keep it to yourself and don’t tell the rest of us. Why? Because noone promised anything. Maybe I am not an old BeOS user (not as old as others), but why critisize Eugenia, BeGirl, David Reid, The OSBOS people and all those that are not still with us anymore?
Finally do something creative. I used to lurk in public forums and talk about anything. I managed to do no good. Now I am trying things up. Try to learn programming. Try to compile some stuff. I could never work around the bugs, but in the past just by trying to compile Bezilla I saw it has no support for BiDi and MathML.. It was a start. It also allowed me to learn what BiDi and MathML means.
Flame me as much as you want. You ‘ll go to /dev/null
I wish all these projects good luck. I hope I can program, make a fast blasing project and maybe make it run in all of them.
BeOS community should look in the mirror. Too much negativity.
hungrypunk
I am feeling the urge to answer Eugenias comments as they look art least unfair. So here it is.
> But there is a big difference: We never promised anything
> to anybody.
Neither did we. Sure we were a bit too much optimistic and ended up with unrealistic *TEMPTATIVE* dates for the first version, but it is *FAR* from promissing anything to anyone.
> We never said we need a beos clone ASAP and at the end of
> the year you will have an alpha.
So that’s why you’re better than us? Note I am not saying *WE* are better than anyone doing any other projects but the way you put things make it looks like we are your enemy. We are not.
And, BTW, I think at the end of this year we will have a real OS to show. Now flame me for giving another false release date.
> We are not the OS of the “people”.
Again, this seems to be a kind of twisted attack to us. To me, it looks being the OS of the people is a good thing. You have all the right not to agree with me but, please, don’t use this to attack us. Even better, do not attack us.
> We do it as a hobby for us, and for us alone, and we
> never got into responsbilities like OBOS has, which lets
> a whole community to wait for the OBOS release as
> the “perfect BeOS clone”.
Now that’s amazing. From now on we will aim to be a regular BeOS clone, not the perfect one. As fasr as our understanting of “perfect” goes and all habilities permit it *WILL* be perfect. It may not match your concept of something perfect but then, again, it is nothimng but your opinion.
Again, we did not promise anything but the fact that we will not stop working on it and it will eventually become something tangible. Even you can’t deny thisis something far to say.
> Sequel is nothing like it and we promise NOTHING to
> ANYBODY. There is this difference my friend…
I just hope the other people working on Sequel are not as petulant as you’re being. We are *NOT* your enemy. We do not care about your project and, in fact, we hope it eventually matures and become something usable just as we hope we mature and become something usable.
-Bruno
Alright, I haven’t read the previous 50 posts or anything, I’m just starting a new general topic regarding these OS developers and open source etc.
I like trying new operating systems. Linux varieties, BSDs, BeOS, Qynx, whatever. But hardware configuration is a pain in the ass. You have a couple pieces of hardware that are slightly less then common, and it completely prevents you from trying something out to it’s full potential.
I don’t know how closely knit the developement community is regarding communication, and this is likely a stupid idea because, as you can see, I’m a stupid noobie. what I propose is this: Implement some testbed across the board for beta software, specifically Operating Systems. Nothing crazy; simply identify the requirements for you average computer, the simply choose one hardware vendor based on it’s market availability, price, features, whatever. It would be the official hardware config of all these OSes, so people would be able to test and run these things that much more effectively. That way, if some hobby project yields some amzing Operating System, it won’t be castrated by the fact that only people working on it with it tailored to the machines can run it. I know the developement community of isn’t huge, but it’s not small either. Given the way linux moved from a “geek os” to consumer (opinions differ) based on it’s popularity among developers, creating an environment that would streamline that process would only help.
So yeah. common testbed, choosing moderately inexpensive hardware that’s widely available. It could be an OEM, or maybe just a collection of big name manufacturers. ex intel p4 1.8, 266 ddr, asus sis 648mb, sb Live, Radeon 7500, cd-rw. done… More important to stress that as all developers got together and used the same test bed. Yeah… that’s it.
I can’t help wondering where we all would be if the BeOS community would unite and build one BeOS replacement.It doesn’t help if several groups start flaming each other and start building more OS’es than we all can use and use newgroups like OSnews for critisizing the news of others (like the way the ZETA website was critisized for it’s grammar).
Anyway..I’ll probably buy/dowload/try all sorts of BeOS replacements (hope to live long enough to see it happen).
Reading these comments is depressing. There’s less asking about features and plans of Sequel than bitching and moaning!
1. Who the hell cares if it’s clolsed source? Unless you are planning to be a developer, why does it matter? Even my complaints with Microsoft have little to do with their OS and apps being closed source. Are you all so brainwashed that you believe that a project is bad if it’s not open source? Please! Use your brain and THINK about it!
2. If you have issues with this plan, go away. That’s not direction – it’s an invite to not whine and complain about something in which you clearly have no interest. Don’t wave your banner of complaint here, just shut up. Why so many people like to post their lack of support is beyond me. I find it generally rude, to be honest.
3. Legitimate suggestions are not only helpful to developers, they’re fun to read. As someone NOT contributing to this project, I like to see not only what the developers say in response to questions prompted, but also what other OS enthusiasts prefer.
4. BeOS clone or not – who cares? I, as I would many others believe, that if the OS works for me, I don’t care the roots, developers, etc behind it. Right now, only Red Hat is truly close enough to match Windows for all the tasks I do. If Sequel can replace it one day, it will, and I won’t care whether it looks like BeOS, Dano, Gnome, KDE, or a screenshot of a hairy butt. If it works – it works.
Definition of the Straw Man fallacy:
In a straw man fallacy the opponents argument is distorted, misrepresented or simply made up. This makes the argument easier to defeat, and can also be used to make opponents look like ignorant extremists.
Unlike some in this discussion might believe, we do not see the OpenBeOS project as our enemy. We even have a link to them on our website.
Sure, I have my opinion about some aspects of the project and there were some mistakes made regarding me in the past, but we got over them and cleared things up.
We are working on a diffent level of appraoch with a different vision and different goals. This does not make OpenBeOS any less than our project.
OpenBeOS tries to create a free and open version of BeOS R5 and wants to go from there. Fine.
We, on the other hand think it will be better just to take the best concepts of BeOS and look at good and valid concepts in other OS’s to combine them into a sequel to BeOS.
Besides this, we think it will slow down the project a lot, if we would let anyone, with any level of experience join our project. Therefore we chose to keep it closed source.
Our license gives people the waranty that the source will be opened when there is need for it. We sure realise, that without such a clause, people will be afraight to waist time again.
If there are people who have ideas, positive or negative reactions, but that could help this OS, you could post them in the Xentronix Sequel forum:
http://www.xentronix.com/module.php?mod=forums
This is also the place we will be able to answer real questions when the time is there, or if we can publish the info.
It will also be used for new team members and future support, so it is archived.
PLEASE do NOT go there to pick on other projects or fight the battle: WHO is better / Who’s the best ?
In the number of years I’ve been lurking on OS projects, only a very few of them ever get to be really mainstream. Observation has shown that they follow a certain behavior, only to be abandoned later on. My only hope this project can avoid that deadly path.
It’s like seeing a hot air balloon taking off, only to burst in flames a couple miles later.
Sorry to be negative and cynical, people. As I’ve seen too many already.
What types of widgets would one create for a hairy butt UI?
i agree with Adam, what the hell’s the matter with you people? Bruno, you should take a Valium and lie down for awhile. Why do you think Eugenia is attackng you?
Why are some of you so deadly serious about this project? You act as if this project they’ve been working on is something you have rights to, that you think is somehow yours to criticize. You don’t even know anything about it!
Are you people so full of yourselves and your opinions about everything that you cannot even enjoy and rejoice in something a group of people are doing? Eugenia is involved in a hobby OS project and she gets crucified for it. What kind of sense does that make?
> Bruno, you should take a Valium and lie down for awhile.
> Why do you think Eugenia is attackng you?
Hmmmmmm? Because she is. Just read her posting. That is an attack by any definition of it.
Look, I usually d not pay attention to this stuff and, in fact since OSNews started I posted only *TWO* messages similar to the one you’re questioning me about. If I ever reserved some time to answer to it you may bet that, at least in my point of view, I needed to do that.
-Bruno
sounds cool…. for all you “if it isn’t open i wont use it” people how about this: If it isn’t closed it doesn’t have a chance anywhere besides being another geek OS! If they were to open it then come up with some great OS they wouldn’t be able to make a profit and would probably stop developing seriously! stop whning go wait for OBOS to come out or something…
I think your team might be under some misapprehensions about what open source means, so I’d like to clear things up a little. Making a project open source does not mean a whole-sale move to the bazaar development model. It does not have to involve any change in your development model at all. Specifically, it does not mean that you have to accept patches from every boob who can use diffutils, or allow anyone who asks nicely to join your team. It can involve as little as allowing anonymous reads from your cvs repository, or posting a source tarball with each release (with an appropriate license of course). Even with no major change to your development model, off the top of my head I can think of three major benefits (and no major downsides) to going open source.
1) Peer Review of Code
All code, everywhere, that is more complex than hello world has bugs. This is a fact of life. Even worse is that many of these bugs are invisible to the developer of the code. They’re just too close to their own work. Since large testing teams and code auditors cost lots of money, the most efficient way for a small project to ferret out these bugs is simply peer review of code.
2) Instant Documentation
An operating system is only as useful as its applications, and you won’t be writing all of them yourself. As a young project your implementations will be buggy and your written documentation will be crap. In this environment having access to the (hopefully clear and well documented) code is invaluable to 3rd party developers. Instead of using trial and error to find a workaround for some major bug they can look at the relevant code and see exactly what the problem is. Better yet, they may not have to use some hacky workaround at all. They may simply be able to fix the bug, which ties back to point number one.
3) Insurance
This is a big one for anyone in the BeOS community. We’ve seen what happens when the developer of a closed source system goes belly up. As they say, once bitten, twice shy. I do not mean to call question on your integrity, but a promise that if things go bad the code will be opened is worth exactly dick-all. If the code isn’t open then it isn’t open, period. Without the code there is no assurance that the the system will continue to be developed in the long term, and that will scare many people away.
People it’s very simple, if you want to have an OS that will attrack vendors (hardware and software) is has to be closed source. Otherwise they are not going to throw code at you. Also by keaping it closed you keap things unified. If your bitching about it not being opensourced it means you just want to be able to rip it off. There is nearly no use for seeing the source code of an OS unless your doing something on the OS level. And anything at that level should be done by the people making it. If your not one of them there is no reason for you to be mucking with it. Your efforts would just cause a mess. The bulk of the arguments for Open Source are silly or incorrect. Sure you might want to just see how it works. But in by doing that the product becomes commerialy worthless. OSX lives because it took an open base but put a huge closed unification on top of things that vendors will use it. Windows ensure vendors that their IP won’t get out. BeOS was sucessful to in this way. It failed do to other things. If it started out opensource it would have never gotten anywheres. The reason it can’t be opensourced is all the code from other companies that got in it. If BeOS was opensourced from the start that important code would have never been there in the first place. The makers of Sequel have said their plans if it dies. You will get your code. I imaging their plan is marking any and all NDA code and such and maybe having a parallel tree with it stripped out. Planning ahead can make this possible. I just hope it never comes to this. I want to see sucessful alternitives OS’s not lame alternitive religions.
what’s up with the sense of entitlement that some people seem to have with regard to other’s projects? whatever this group decides to do, it’s their choice and their project. just read what frans is saying at least before you post.
Just off topic, but..
Eugenia, why dont you help us create the new UI for syllable?, wich is ‘applicable’ ATM.
You could use this for your own experience in the future when ‘Sequel” is up to the point of using your UI.
And you’ll be helping us upgrade/refunctionalize and improve syllables looking wich has serious flaws by now.
So, is this the fabled Eunix?
IOW, are you taking Linux, ironing out some of the wrinkles, while keeping the POSIX wrinkle, and then impementing an OS on top of it?
>>> Adam Scheinberg:
“Who the hell cares if it’s clolsed source? Unless you are planning to be a developer, why does it matter? Even my complaints with Microsoft have little to do with their OS and apps being closed source. Are you all so brainwashed that you believe that a project is bad if it’s not open source? Please! Use your brain and THINK about it!”
It matters insofar as I may invest time and effort into something that is not likely to succeed and that may vanish completely. I agree that it does not matter as much if there is an established market as it is the case with Microsoft Windows. But it is not likely that “Sequel” will succeed.
>>> Brad:
“People it’s very simple, if you want to have an OS that will attrack vendors (hardware and software) is has to be closed source. Otherwise they are not going to throw code at you.”
You better update your knowledge about open source. It seems as if you are confusing the GPL with open source in general.
“If your bitching about it not being opensourced it means you just want to be able to rip it off.”
I’d call it take over. If this project is a commercial failure it could be continued by others.
There is nothing to talk about. Somebody somewhere is doing something called Sequel. Well… Good luck!
I’m waiting for Zeta and OBOS. And dreaming my own dreams:)
It matters insofar as I may invest time and effort into something that is not likely to succeed and that may vanish completely. I agree that it does not matter as much if there is an established market as it is the case with Microsoft Windows. But it is not likely that “Sequel” will succeed.
And whether it succeeds or not has got very little to do with the source being open or not.
Does this mean BlueEyed has gone the way of the dodo? Frans I know was working on that project.
…i wish a new operating system with an object format which is portable and hardware independent (that is, binaries, should run unmodified on X86 and PowerPC)
At 1st I was a bit teed off since I saw it as fragmenting the BeOS dev base, but after reading the comments, I am lot cooler with it, after all people work on whatever they want.
One thing I do like to see is not endless list of features but a clear, consise small useable OS.
Right now WinNT code base is in the 10’s millions of lines and requires 2GBytes of install (give or take a few 100M), and there is price to pay for all that complexity for everyone that touches it. Linux is not that different in size.
Yet the infamous QNX Photon was able to create something amazing that fit on a floppy. Even MacOS1.0 fitted on a floppy in 84.
With all that is known today it should still be possible to create a small BeOS/Photon/Mac OS minimalist OS that can fit in a zip disk before importing the zillions of other things that should be addons.
Good luck!
>>> Iggy Drougge:
“And whether it succeeds or not has got very little to do with the source being open or not.”
I said nothing about this.
>>Are you all so brainwashed that you believe that a project
>>is bad if it’s not open source? Please! Use your brain
>>and THINK about it!”
>It matters insofar as I may invest time and effort into >something that is not likely to succeed and that may
>vanish completely.
Is that really true though?
BeOS is under development again as Zeta.
OS/2 became eComStation.
There is outright warfare at time in the Amiga community over which OS/Hardware solution to chose…
If there’s any value to it, closed source will live on…
Open Source and Closed Source both have their Pros and Cons, neither is perfect.
—
>The makers of Sequel have said their plans if it dies.
>You will get your code.
Interesting clause, don’t know how it would go down with potential investors though. However, you do see clauses like this in commercial contracts, this extends it to users which is quite unusual.
—
To the Sequal team, OBOS and others – there will always be critics, they don’t make progress, you do.
Go for it 🙂
While I expect this project has already got alot of the GUI behaviour specc’ed for Eugenia to have designed the widgets, here is what I would like to see:
from IBM and MacOS 9
– OpenDoc style document centric approach
from osx
– installing programs is just dragging one icon to a disk, uninstalling by dragging to the trash.
– Column View navigation
from BeOS
– surport for very big hard drives and lots of RAM, plus all the other stuff that made it an OS designed for multimedia.
– dock
– blazing speed
from *nix
– surport for standards (W3C, ECMA etc.) in fact it might be nice to open the whole OS for ECMA scripting as this is a powerful and already well known scripting language.
Chris
>Eugenia, why dont you help us create the new UI for syllable?
I already have. I am fond of Syllable:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=2581&offset=15&rows=30#64…
All you have to do is clean up what you already have, before you go forward. Syllable has other priorities atm.
People it’s very simple,
>>>>>>
Actually, it’s your ideology that is simple. Overly simple.
if you want to have an OS that will attrack vendors (hardware and software) is has to be closed source. Otherwise they are not going to throw code at you.
>>>>>>
Linux has no problems attracting hardware vendors. First, most hardware vendors have realized by now that the level of IP the hardware interface reveals is worth jack shit. Second, for those cases where it does matter, Linux has a special clause to enable binary drivers. The fact that more people don’t take advantage of this is due to the lack of a stable driver API (which is due to the fast pace of kernel development) more than anything else.
Also by keaping it closed you keap things unified.
>>>>>
How many Linux kernel’s are there? There are many specialized derivatives that have generally the same API. That is a feature, not a bug. In many situations, its important that you can have a special version of the kernel. That’s why Linux runs on everything from a Palm to an IBM mainframe. Even taking those variations into account, there is still one definitive Linux kernel source. And this unification idea is bullshit. Do you realize how many specialized versions of the WinNT kernel are floating around? Beyond that, how many versions of KDE are there? One. How many versions of GNOME? One. Aside from a few high-profile forks (mostly long ago, like Emacs vs XEmacs) I haven’t seen any of this “OSS leads to fragmentation” crap I keep hearing.
If your bitching about it not being opensourced it means you just want to be able to rip it off. There is nearly no use for seeing the source code of an OS unless your doing something on the OS level.
>>>>>>>>>>
No offense to the developers, but it is highly unlikely they have anything anybody wants to rip off. There is a lot of high quality OSS code out there, and you simply are not going to be able to match it for a long time. That said, how many people do things at the kernel level? Hundreds. Between 2.4 and 2.6, Linux got a new VM, new block-IO layer, new scheduler, new IO-scheduler, new driver API, new filesystems, etc. And it’s a freaking point release! A small team of developers simply cannot improve the OS as fast as Microsoft or the Linux kernel devs can. Lastly, I’m sick of not being able to fix bugs in my OS. To whit: I fixed a bug in the USB joystick driver back in the BeOS days to run it with my Sidewinder Precision Pro. I’ve edited Keramik to remove the annoying gradients in the toolbars. Right now, I’m trying to track down an ACPI oddity that causes my laptop to beep incessently when power management is enabled. I couldn’t do any of those in a closed source OS.
And anything at that level should be done by the people making it. If your not one of them there is no reason for you to be mucking with it. Your efforts would just cause a mess.
>>>>>>>>>
Right. Because the core developers are the only one with a clue. I’m not even going to dignify this one. Just read the linux-kernel mailing lists and see how many “new” developers have made significant contributions to the core code. Just take a look at stuff like UVM (the NetBSD VM) that was coded by a college student as a research projects. Understand OSS developer culture before spouting off.
The bulk of the arguments for Open Source are silly or incorrect. Sure you might want to just see how it works. But in by doing that the product becomes commerialy worthless.
>>>>
Funny. IBM, Intel, TrollTech, RedHat, AOL, and many other companies are doing just fine with OSS products. OSS != GPL. If the GPL is too liberal for you, go with something that allows you to control redistribution of binaries. Just keep the source visible!
Windows ensure vendors that their IP won’t get out.
>>>>>>>>
How? You can program a closed source app in Linux just as easily as you can in Windows. See: Kylix, Intel C++, Maya, etc for examples.
> No offense to the developers, but it is highly unlikely they have anything anybody wants to rip off.
My UI design/mockups is one of the things I don’t want to see ripped off as skins on Windows and Linux.
And at the end of the day, remember AtheOS? It was not that far along the line either. But in 1 year it has seen so many forks, that Kurt is pissed off about it. I don’t think we want to see that. Even NewOS, which is just a kernel has been forked. Forks is one thing we don’t like, and it doesn’t matter one bit how far down the line Sequel is, or it is not.
> Linux has no problems attracting hardware vendors
Excuse me, but it took 6 years for Linux to attract its first hardware vendors, and companies that would give driver code away. We don’t have the luxury of waiting 6 years, neither I believe that Sequel can create the HYPE Linux currently has. So, we are playing on different rules. OSS is out of the question for the TIME BEING and deal with it. If you don’t like it, look elsewhere.
While I think there’s enough good and bad points to both the open and closed development models that one can’t conclusively say that one is definitively better or not, a few observations:
– Rayiner, you mention being able to fix the bug in a USB joystick driver in BeOS as an advantage of open source, but of course BeOS wasn’t open source–it just had an open and (reasonably) well-documented API. This seems to be the model that Sequel is looking at, so the entire argument may be rendered somewhat moot, yes? (Back in the BeOS day I argued for having the source of the Kits be opened, while leaving the kernel and servers closed.)
– Let’s be honest, part 1: AtheOS likely wouldn’t have forked if Kurt had kept working on it or, failing that, let other people actively work on his codebase. It was his choice and his right to say “it’s just my project and only I can touch it,” but he actively sought to create a community around it. When your hobby project has dozens hundreds of people involved around the world, it is no longer just your hobby.
– Let’s be honest, part 2: When there are screenshots alone of Sequel, there will be an Object Desktop clone of it within four working days. Being closed source is utterly irrelevant to this.
My UI design/mockups is one of the things I don’t want to see ripped off as skins on Windows and Linux.
And at the end of the day, remember AtheOS? It was not that far along the line either. But in 1 year it has seen so many forks, that Kurt is pissed off about it. I don’t think we want to see that. Even NewOS, which is just a kernel has been forked. Forks is one thing we don’t like, and it doesn’t matter one bit how far down the line Sequel is, or it is not.
I, for one, totally understand. I mean, look at Dano. All people had were a few screenshots, and a complete WindowsBlinds skin was made from it! ( http://www.wincustomize.com/window.asp?Cmd=COMMENTS&Lib=1&SkinID=22… )
I’m sure it will be amazing when it’s ready
Hi, i have some questions:
-You say is closed source but will it be free (like winamp)?
-What kind of kernel is it? monolithic, microkernel or exokernel? I like exokernels a lot, mostly because i’ve never seen one working 🙂
-UI, will it be like old beos or something new (like sliker)
Its not about technology, its about selling culture to a braindead generation of ‘Friends’ and computer game creeps. You can bet this screenshot won’t please them:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/screenshot.html
Will this OS be implementing your idea about not having applications but instead many “plug-in” type objects?
So far Adam seems to have been one of the few people to actually make a sensible comment.
>1. Who the hell cares if it’s clolsed source? Unless you >are planning to be a developer, why does it matter? Even my >complaints with Microsoft have little to do with their OS >and apps being closed source. Are you all so brainwashed >that you believe that a project is bad if it’s not open >source? Please! Use your brain and THINK about it!
I’ve never understood peoples allegiance to things like this. If the product works and does what it’s supposed to, what’s it matter if it’s Open Source or not? I’d say probably close to 95% of the people who use, and tout, Open Source products have never done anything more than type “make && make install” with the source. I see all these people saying that an OS is Open Source it will succeed, or that even if it dies that it can still go on – it doesn’t. It still requires people to carry on with the source. I’m sure there are plenty of failed Open Source products / open source that’ve been left for dead.
>3. Legitimate suggestions are not only helpful to >developers, they’re fun to read. As someone NOT >contributing to this project, I like to see not only what >the developers say in response to questions prompted, but >also what other OS enthusiasts prefer.
I can’t agree more. Nothing makes a developers day more than reading a users feedback (Except maybe hunting down that long standing bug
.
I say kudos to the Sequel team. As long as you are enjoying what you are doing it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of it. That goes for anyone working on any project – no matter how big or small.
Maybe my post is subjective on this topic, but will try to remain as objective as possible.
A few years back 1999/2000, when BeOS *WAS* alive, I contacted Matrox and DPS, makers of digital video edition boards, to try bring support of these boards to beos.
Signed contracts and start working on *closedsource* driver code migrating them fron NT and DOS to BeOS.
A few months later, after 5 engineers ported every bit of code, we migrated our tools and applications to BeOS, creating a complete new experience to our customers.
Now I can publish this, because beos is *officially* dead, and our contracts have expired.
If BeOS, on that time was opensourced, the license of it could be a nightmare to us.
Matrox nor DPS will love to release their years of R&D just because we compile with GPL libraries on a GPLed OS.
Sometimes, closed source isn’t bad, what is bad is been *closeminded*
Is usual that opensource projects get *forked* just because a developer didn’t agree with other, then a new fork is made, and another, and another…
At the end, you have 4 forked and NONE working project, just because developers wanted to, and focus their energy on fighting “my fork is better than yours” and so on, instead of use that energy on be productive.
Just my opinion, I will love to work on new projects that share some of my interest: speed, multimedia capabilities and clean design, easy to be embedded and without a steppy learning curve.
Sorry my poor english.
Luis Lavena
MMediaSys
http://www.mmediasys.com
Luis, I think you don’t argue against open-source with this, but against the GPL license model. If you consider e.g. OpenBeOS’ MIT license, you could have closed source drivers et al without any problems. Plus, all your efforts wouldn’t be for naught because the closed-source OS went belly up.
How about releasing your ported apps (and drivers?) once OpenBeOS is usable? It will be R5-compatible after all…
Frans van Nispen wrote:
If we were to create a Geek OS, we would have open sourced.
I’m not pro or against Open Source, [Open Source] is not the solution to everything, in contrast to what others think, I actually prefer closed source. Maybe with some Open Source parts, a la OSX.
Even though my comment looked harsh, I’ll be keeping an eye on the progress, but as long as there is no real usability, I’m not interested. I left the hackidyhack kernelconfig path a long time ago, now I just want to *use* a computer.
BeOS was perfect, died, now I switched to MacOS X, like it, but it does not cut it the way BeOS did. If there’s going to be another OS, which has features, hardware support and is fast, I won’t hesitate to switch again..
I just wanted to point out the fact that there are so many OS-es which do not add anything to the ones available, I’m afraid this attempt will be more of the same.. Still, if you can prove otherwise, I’d be a happy puppy
The world needs more variety. You’re ideas might be the ones that catch on, or they might not. Either way, they get new ideas & insights out for people to see.
I don’t expect a miricle from any of the BeOS style projects. It’s too much of an uphill battle for any sort of fast progress.
I’ll eagerly await anything the project puts out so that I can try it.