[haiku] Re: Just an idea
- From: Sean Collins <smc.collins@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 21:16:54 -0400
/Marcus Jacob wrote:/
/On 06.06.2013, at 20:50, <dancso.robert@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:dancso.robert@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:/
/
/
/DISCLAIMER: The following statements are my personal opinion and in
no way represent the opinion of my current or past employers. Also I
might be biased, as I worked for Be, Inc. as well as Fujitsu-Siemens
Computers and are currently working for a large multi-national OEM as
product manager./
/
/
/I don't want to spoil your enthusiasm, but I think your dream is
totally unrealistic, at least if you think in terms of the traditional
multi-national OEMs./
I think your totally right, and trying to work with large
multinational corporations who have lock in contracts for software
distribution doesn't make even a iota of sense.If you wanted to do this,
it will be all about the grass roots promoting, getting haiku into the
local computer repair shop, getting the word out to tech and IT people.
Its not something that we are going to solve by trying to uproot a very
entrenched and monopolistic "abusive one at that" market holder. For all
of the value "har har" apple has, they can't really make a dent in that
market share.
Apart from the lack of a commercial incentive, if they would pick up a
niche system, that would create a support nightmare.
OEM's, they support to much and not enough training and rtfm upfront.
/Keep in mind, even in the good old BeOS times there where only very
few OEMs who could be convinced to at least give it a try in a
dual-boot setup (only Fujitsu-Siemens Computers and Hitachi). And in
that case they at least had a commercial entity as sparring partner./
/
/
/Besides I think much more important for success, if success would be
defined as being something different than a really cool hobbyist
project from a very cool community, would be other factors as first
and foremost serious applications, ideally at least on killer
application giving an incentive and need to actually use Haiku for
production purposes./
/
/
/Furthermore there would be the need to fine-tune the project to
"commercial" grade quality in terms of documentation, direction and
roadmap, marketing, etc., which would probably require some product
managers telling the developers what to do, which I think is highly
unrealistic and not wanted by the project and the developers/.
Most of the haiku devs, are superviros and managers in some regard from
my observations. The biggest challenge I see for Haiku is having the
funding to pay the developers enough to finish the project into R1
reasonably soon.
/And I didn't even started on hardware support like drivers or the
basic booting infrastructure, which might be needed for a lot of
current and next generation hardware like full UEFI support, not
relying on a fully functional CSM module being implemented by the OEM
to be able to boot Haiku./
I hate uefi and efi, it solves a problem that didn't need a solution.
/*
*/
/*As an indicator of viability you might also look at the number of
products from tier 1 OEMs, which come pre-installed with a real Linux,
as opposed to the LiveCD, command-line or FreeDOS version. The latter
are usually only utilized in special cases, where customers actually
desire a system with no OS at all. Afaik the only real Linux product,
of course apart from special purpose systems, servers, etc., which I'm
aware of as recent offering is a Dell Ultrabook. And OEM confidence in
Linux is much higher, as it is also the base for the leading mobile OS.*/
/*
*/
/*Sorry for this "pessimistic" opinion ...*/
/*
*/
/*Cheers,*/
/*Rossi*/
I doubt trying to court OEM's is even a remotely good idea, IBM didn't
pay attention to Microsoft for a good long while.
You take over a governments from teh bottom up, not from the top down,
such is the evolution in every market. To make Haiku sucessful in the
marketplace, will require guerrilla style marketing etc.
Sean
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