[openbeos] I am back

Still moving into the new house, but the computer is hooked up, anyway. :-)

A few interesting       issues of note came up while I was doing heavy manual 
labor and (since I have you all as my captive audience) I thought that I would 
address them.

1) What if Palm:
a) never says anything to anyone about BeOS?
b) Creates Be2 Inc and ships closed source OS releases?
c) Opens all of the source?

a is pretty easy - that is the (pessimistic) assumption that I started this 
project on.
c is probably pretty easy too - I think that working on what exists will get us 
the farthest.
b is tougher. There will certainly be a split in the community. Personally, I 
would like to wait and see if this happens or not. If the company is like Be 
(1998), then that might be OK. Especially if they were to agree to open the 
source if they ever closed their doors. 

2) Combining our efforts into a few kits, rather than the several that we are 
looking at right now. This is a tough organizational question. Some people are 
"into" their pet areas. Others don't care where they work. PERSONALLY, I don't 
see networking as that big of a deal. I want to use BeOS as a desktop OS. My 
cable modem doesn't do more than 10megabit/second. I don't need bone. 
Net_server was just fine for me. BONE is the least appealing feature of an R6 
to ME. Others want to see it very badly. I don't really understand why, unless 
it is for the file descriptors == socket descriptors. I wonder if most people 
even understand what that is and why it is important. Sure we all do, but most 
others could care less. 

Anyway - as far as the concentration of work, we have a vast quantity of 
lurkers. The list is at 80-85 subscribers. Maybe 10 people actively signed up 
for anything. I planned for having more active participants. As we leave the 
planning stages, we will need to get more commitments or backtrack on what we 
can do.

3) Binary vs source compatibility is another tough question. I have nothing but 
the highest respect for Be's engineers. Some are lurking. I doubt that we will 
do better than they did, certainly not for a 1.0 release. I am a little scared 
of the compatability issue. On one hand, every app that we discard because we 
don't have source is one less reason to run OB1. OTOH, source compatability is 
MUCH easier. And we don't have to recreate other people's bugs. But we do (as 
was pointed out by others) lose individual testability. 

So what do we do? I think that Erik has it right - try for the harder goal. If 
we absolutely can not make it happen, then we decide.

Enough rambling. I will try to keep these messages down to a more reasonable 
time frame - I think that once a week is a goiod choice. 
One thing that I always thought was very cool was the way that Be used to 
condense the mailing list into its weekly newsletters. Would someone 
(preferably a non-coder who wants to contribute) like to do that? They could 
mail it to me on (say) Friday evening. I would add comments to it (like Be did 
with "The Be Line:") and other news, then post on Friday or Saturday. If 
someone wants to volunteer, please let me know.

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