[haiku-development] Re: R1 (Final) General Interest poll closed. Results posted. ...

  • From: Christoph Thompson <cjsthompson@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 02:25:30 +0100

Hi,

Here are some random thoughts. Instead of trying to support every piece of
hardware that's commonly available out there, which is a daunting task to
say the least, why not instead just try to focus on supporting fully just
two or three specific machines which are cheap and widely available. Like
for instance one of those Intel Atom-based mini-ITX PCs and a cheap netbook.
These would be R1's reference platforms of sorts. And every other piece of
hardware that works is then a bonus but not a requirement. Thus people will
not expect Haiku to run everywhere and they won't be dissapointed when it
doesn't. MacOS X would probably never have made it if Apple hadn't focused
on their own specific machines at first instead of having to support every
piece of hardware out there. When some official reference machines are
selected, then ask the manufacturers of these machines for help in the form
of docs and hardware for the core Haiku developers. Since after all their
platform will have the privilege of being compatible with one hell of a cool
OS called Haiku. This will undoubtedly generate sales for them from people
who want to run Haiku after having tried it out in VMWare (or any other
emulator) or played with someone else's Haiku machine. I believe that's not
unlike what JMicron did for AHCI in Haiku. Also Haiku Inc. (or another
entity created for that purpose) could try to get a deal on a number of
these reference machines which it would then sell with Haiku pre-installed.
This would generate revenue for Haiku Inc. in order to further fund
development. This « Haiku PC » could be directly ordered from the Haiku
website.

I hope that these suggestions are helpful,

Bye,

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