FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: Windows Vista Performance Kludges (that Haiku does

["Waldemar Kornewald" <wkornewald@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/13/06, Simon Taylor <simontaylor1@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I do feel Haiku needs some more formal way of preventing bloat. At the moment it is 
> safeguarded by the people who have SVN access having the "right idea". In 
> future though, Haiku is likely to be swamped with contributions from people from Linux 
> backgrounds adding the particular features they feel they couldn't live without, and I 
> think Haiku needs a way of dealing with that. Honestly I think we will have a fight on 
> our hands to prevent the Haiku user experience tending towards that of Linux - the only 
> reason I'm still following Haiku is I believe it's one we can win.
The problem is that some potential new developers will disagree
heavily and leave the Haiku project. Also, if we published such a
document there could be a lot of technical and non-technical users who
misunderstand Haiku as being less powerful than other systems. We'd
draw users off before they even tried Haiku and we might start a
permanent flame war (many features vs useful limits) that has a
negative impact on Haiku and creates bad myths and false statements
about it (e.g.: Linux users could say: "Haiku limits what you can do.
It's inflexible.").

I think that anyone who is reading our mails and forums posts will get
the idea of what our philosophy is and our current developers seem to
all agree on it. But we do have a short internal document called "The
Haiku Philosophy" which we're hiding in Axel's basement for the
possible day that we get into trouble. ;)

This message will self-destruct in five seconds... I hope you get it.
(don't reply :)

Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald