[openbeos] Re: Wall Street Journal article on OBOS

Computer Programmers See
Beauty in Bid to Revive BeOS

By NICK BAKER
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

NEW YORK -- Michael Phipps creates software, and for some -- even him --
that ends the discussion of whether he's artistic.

His wife, a singer, sets the aesthetic standard in the family, he says, and
it's her skills that should be passed on to their two children. "I have no
dreams of teaching them how to code. They're artistic like my wife," says
the 30-year- old Mr. Phipps, who lives in Rochester, N.Y. "I have no skills
in that regard."

But he's wrong. He's undertaken a project, the resurrection of the defunct
BeOS operating system, that is an exercise in artistry. Mr. Phipps and his
team of 20 programmers were drawn to the project by what they see as the
underlying beauty of BeOS. They praise its simplicity of design, stability
and ease of use.

Their quest is a longshot: Microsoft Corp.'s Windows dominates the market
for operating systems, which control computer hardware and provide the
environment for software such as word processors and Web browsers to
operate. And Linux is a leader in the open-source world, where individuals
have access to the source code and can add enhancements.

"As far as I can see, OpenBeOS is more an admirable aesthetic experiment,"
says Timothy Lord, a contributor to tech-enthusiast Web site Slashdot
(www.slashdot.org). "As it is," he adds, "they're esoteric among esoterica."

BeOS was introduced in 1995 by Be Inc. for its BeBox brand of computers. Be
Inc. is essentially out of business now -- it burned through millions of
dollars and never turned a profit after going public in 1999, and the
operating system it built is frozen at its fifth version, which was released
in 2000. Be Inc. sold its intellectual property to Palm Inc. the following
year, and Palm promptly halted development of BeOS. Palm declined to say why
it hasn't used BeOS commercially.

Days after the Palm deal was announced in August 2001, Mr. Phipps, who works
for a telecommunications company in Rochester, formed a team to launch the
OpenBeOS project. Their aim: to build a functional clone of BeOS that can
run on new personal computers. The project is open source, like Linux,
meaning any programmer can step up to tinker with it.

Be Inc. lost millions of dollars, and the shell of its corporate structure
remains to wage a private antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. But none of
that matters to Mr. Phipps and his colleagues, who simply care about keeping
the operating system alive.

"I like simple designs," says Mr. Phipps, who has been programming computers
since he was eight years old. His goals for OpenBeOS include keeping the
code pithy, keeping it well organized, and making sure it runs software
rapidly.

Other operating systems? They're bogged down by the "cruft" of conventional
OS design, says Mr. Phipps, who prefers a legacy-free approach that embraces
excellence rather than blindly following tradition. "Cruft is as disgusting
as it sounds. It's like barnacles on a ship that build up over time," he
adds.

Mr. Phipps has used and developed software for Windows, which is "closed
source," but found it maddening. "It wasn't fun to write for. I had to
struggle to get the OS to do what I wanted."

Now, he's helping to build a digital Nirvana that he hopes will keep alive
Be's mission of developing an operating system unencumbered by anachronisms.

Eliminating these software vestiges is precisely what Be, founded by former
Apple Computer Inc. executive Jean-Louis Gassee in 1990, set out to do --
even though it faced the entrenched Microsoft and Apple operating system
alternatives.

Such iconoclastic efforts are laudable, according to another Apple alumnus,
co-founder Steve Wozniak, who says he designed systems to be elegant and
efficient.

BeOS, too, broke ground for an operating system marketed to consumers. Mr.
Phipps, like many others, loves BeOS's ease of use and robust foundation. It
functions hastily. It rarely crashes, a feature that consumer versions of
Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Mac OS, the most popular systems for
consumers, didn't have until 2001.

Open source allows developers to pursue such lofty goals. This development
approach "lets programmers take control of their art and be an artist and
chase the notion of beauty," says Eric Raymond, a leader in the open-source
movement.

Despite its technical merits, Mr. Raymond doubts that OpenBeOS will ever be
widely adopted. (And, it should be noted, even Mr. Phipps recognizes that
OpenBeOS faces a tough future.)

Within the open-source community, Linux is the favored operating system. As
such, Mr. Raymond believes programmers will be more inclined to take
OpenBeOS's admirable traits and roll them into Linux rather than actually
use OpenBeOS.

Still, Mr. Raymond believes the BeOS architecture is alluring, and he
believes a critique used by bridge builders is apt.

"Bridges should look beautiful," he says. "If they don't, there's a kind of
ungracefulness that's likely to reflect structural problems in the design."

Take Linux, a variant of the three-decades-old Unix platform, that has its
feet firmly locked in tradition. It is unquestionably robust. It runs a
large collection of powerful software. And it's clunky, Mr. Phipps says. Mr.
Phipps hopes his group will have completed an alpha or beta release --
programming jargon for test versions of software, with the latter more
developed than the former -- by August, OpenBeOS's two-year anniversary. By
then, OpenBeOS will have a new name to avoid any conflict with Palm.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: S. J. Strutt 
> Sent: Thursday, 6 February 2003 9:30 AM
> To:   openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:      [openbeos] Re: Wall Street Journal article on OBOS
> 
> 
> 
> > Oh yeah, and the link is:
> > http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1044416416193759053,00.html
> 
> Is anyone able (and willing) to post the full text of the article?
> 
> 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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