[openbeos] Re: OpenBeOS Project -- comment/question

Thanks for your comments and interest John!

I'm going to forward this reply to the OpenBeOS mailing list as well, 
because I think there are others who would like to hear this.


How much support does OpenBeOS have?

Quite a bit, as far as I can tell. The previous web site, 
www.obedn.com, was getting about 1000 hits per day in its initial 
couple of weeks. And over 200 people registered as members of the site 
before it shut down. So clearly there is lots of interest out there. 
It's also quite encouraging to see several (former) Be engineers 
posting on the mailing list. We can use all the advice and help they 
can provide.

Still, it's difficult at this point to tell how many of these people 
are truly committed to what OpenBeOS is trying to do, and how many are 
just interested bystanders who'll jump off at a moment's notice. A lot 
of that, however, will depend on us (the OpenBeOS crew) and how well we 
produce. I feel pretty certain that the moment even a *whiff* of 
success from this project hits the air, you'll see more new members, 
developers, and supporters jumping aboard than anyone could possibly 
believe.

The forums on the sourceforge page are empty basically because no one 
knows about them. At least, that's my theory. The sourceforge project 
page is a kind of generic page that all projects get. Our sourceforge 
project page was basically an orphan. The original web site at open-
beos.sourceforge.net never referred to  it. Phyte's site at 
www.obedn.com never mentioned it (altho it had its own forums). I never 
saw any mention of it in the mailing list. I've finally put a link to 
the darn thing on the new open-beos.sourceforge.net on the Resources 
page. Now maybe someday knows about it.


Binary compatibility?

Why of course! As long as it's free and comes with whipped cream and 
nuts!

As far as I remember, when we last left off this subject, we had 
basically decided three things:

1) Binary compatibility is a wonderful thing and we should have it if 
it's at all possible
2) Binary compatibility is a real bitch and might not be worth it
3) It's still too early of a phase in the project to obsess too much 
over it (ya know, the old 'we'll worry about that later' kinda thing)

For my part, I hope we don't put off cracking this hard nut for too 
long. It has lots of repercussions, both for the source code itself and 
the community at large.

Regardless of how we decide on that sticky point, it is definitely true 
that we are committed to making improvements to BeOS as we go.  As an 
example, the kernel team is actively working on designing the virtual 
memory model so that it doesn't share the 1 Gig problem that BeOS 
currently has (can't use more than 1 Gig of physical ram). 

You must know that even if we went with full binary compatibility, we 
still have room to make changes and improvements as we go. If we 
decided to support only source compatibility then we'd have a *helluva*
 lot of wiggle room to make changes. Either way, you can be sure that 
we will take what Be gave us and improve it as best we can. Absolutely.

John, I hope you decide to join in. No one has to quit their day job or 
abandon any other hobbies/activities they are involved with. Perhaps 
you can spare a few hours on the weekend to play around with some code. 
If we have lots of people who can contribute in this manner, it will 
make a big difference down the road.

>Daniel,
>
>I finally got around to checking out the OpenBeOS website and I'm glad
>I did. It's looking very impressive. I hope a lot of people jump on 
the
>bandwagon so we don't lose this. This could be Huge.
>
>I've only done very little c/c++ programming and have already gone
>the way of java so I don't think I have much I could offer you.
>I'll have to think more about this... I did some BeOS programming for
>fun at home before switching to java.
>
>I do have a few questions though. If you could create some time to
>answer them for me, I'd appreciate it:
>
>How much support is OpenBeOS seeing? I noticed that the forums at
>http://sourceforge.net/projects/open-beos/
>are empty... Strange for such an out-going BeOS community...(?)
>
>Are you still shooting for binary compatibility? The reason I ask is
>that I'm guessing there are some things in BeOS that could've actually
>been done better than they were (for example, I saw a discussion at
>http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=66
>about problems with multi-threading under BeOS).
>Is the OpenBeOS project interested in improvement of the original
>BeOS design?
>
>Thanks for your time.
>
>---j
>
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! 
Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com

Other related posts: