Koki said:
These changes would not be intrinsically intended to create a separate
distribution from the official one, but simply to make the Haiku demo
experience more accessible and interesting, and therefore enhance its
promotional effect.
If Haiku considered itself in a state ready to be handed out as a demo CD,
there would be an official pre-alpha demo release. There isn't (not sure on the
VMWare image you mentioned), for the reason that the experience is not yet
anything like R1 should be. Yes, so it basically works - which is great to see
if you're an ex-BeOSer who thought the goal unattainable - but it's unoptimised
and pretty slow, still pretty buggy, and not all that stable.
The fact that there isn't a base distribution yet does make hard to know what to do with
people wanting to build stuff now. I don't think allowing the use of the Haiku name is
the way to go though. The disclaimer "not the official Haiku distribution"
could be changed until such a distro exists.
In the case of a CD produced to demo at a single event, say SCaLE, the distro could be
called "SCaLE 2007 Demo", and then lower down on the CD it could include the
text:
"This CD is based on pre-release Haiku code. The Haiku project will release an
official distribution of the OS when it is ready. For information about the official
Haiku project, please visit http://haiku-os.org.
This software is work in progress and has missing functionality as well as many
(known and unknown) bugs. Use at your own risk.
We are not affiliated with Haiku, do not contact them for support."
This doesn't follow the letter of the guidelines exactly (but the fact they're guidelines
and not "rules" suggests that may be OK). I still think it's a good idea to
make it clear these CDs are unofficial and to disallow use of the Haiku name or logo.
