[openbeos] Re: News, Views and Overdues

  • From: Zenja Solaja <solaja@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 09:22:33 +1000

Peter Stegemann wrote: 
<quote>
This is one of the MOST important questions: WHY do we want to rewrite BeOS?
<end quote>

My answer
I am sick of investing time and effort into a closed source OS and have its
parent company die (like Commodore and BeInc, and we all know who the next
victims will be - Apple and Palm).  I am sick of the *nix architectures and
searching RPMfind every time I install a new app. Lastly, I'm sick of win32
programming during my day job.  Why do you think we all met at BeInc's
party?    The upstarts like AtheOS have even bigger hardware and multimedia
problems.  Thanks to the modular achitecture of BeOS, even if it takes us 18
months just to replace the kernel and app_server (and not touch any other
kit), we'd still have a usable multimedia aware OS with more drivers than
AtheOS and MacOSX.  The other kits can still be used and interfaced to the
new open source version.  You want multiuser capabilities - fine, the source
is available and can be implemented.  Rewritting a kernel isn't a impossible
task, just look around the net for countless examples or download the
Xinu/Linux/FreeBSD source and start molding away until you get something
which is source compatible with BeOS.  Linking a pointer to a function isn't
rocket science you know, so binary comatibility isn't impossible either.  As
I've mentioned in my prep talk, stop ***whinning*** about how impossilbe
something is and just do it!!!!! 

If we're delusional and crazy, thats fine.  As someone already pointed out -
if I need to become a kernel guru, then by thunder, I **will** become a
kernel guru.  Remember, the crazy ones are the people who change the world -
the normal ones just blend in.

Michael Phipps summed it up quite nicely  
<quote>
>If we drag our feet for a couple of years and nothing really happens, 
>then you'll really see the death of an OS. At that point, many people
>would be thinking, "damn, if we had started the OpenBeOS thing and 
>really worked on it, we'd be two years into it by now and really have 
>something to show". So let's not become future regretters... let's roll 
>up the sleeves and start working now!
<end quote>

Bingo.  
  





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