[openbeos] One spoon at a time
- From: "Daniel Reinhold" <danielr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "openBeos mailing list" <openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2001 18:17:02 CDT
How do you eat an elephant (the saying goes)? One spoon at a time!
Several people have commented on how crazy an OpenBeOS project would be
because it would be such a huge task to undertake. Well, it's
definitely not trivial, that's for sure. But I don't think it's quite
as bad as many make it seem. Here's my reasoning:
a) the user interface is already taken care of
b) the design is already taken care of
The user interface is already open sourced with OpenTracker and
OpenDeskbar. Ok, that's not the entire user interface -- you do have
the 'app_server' drawing windows, etc. But basically what you would
call the user shell for the OS is already done and that's an extremely
important and large part of any OS implementation.
The design is already done -- it's called the BeOS API. It takes years
of thought, prototyping, hashing around ideas, tossing them out, and
tweaking to come up with any design, let alone a good one. Be engineers
have already done this. We just have to re-implement the design. Yes,
implementation is a big thing, but it's a helluva lot less than having
to design and implement together. Using the BeOS API removes man-years
from the project time table.
Of course, what I said only applies if OpenBeOS is used to create a
source/binary compatible version of BeOS R5. If it becomes a place
where everyone decides to test out his favorite operating system theory
and/or try to insert his 'I-always-wanted-this-in-the-BeOS' feature,
then the project will never finish.
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