[openbeos] Re: unrar & about us

  • From: Adi Oanca <adioanca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 11:36:03 +0200

Hi All,

Read below, pls

Michael Phipps wrote: 
On 2005-01-28 at 02:25:41 [-0500], Adi Oanca wrote:

Auch! I thought we will avoid the distribution nightmare. I *hate* Linux coming in a lot of "desktop" flavors.
What happened to "Doing The Right Thing(TM)"? I thought we will offer our distribution. If we do so, do you think others will have a chance, especially because of licensing problems? (and cost) 


I am sort of surprised that this is coming up...

Basically, the plan is something like this.
We will put out a base distro. Pretty much what builds in CVS/SVN/whatever.
A bootable CD with our apps. Nothing (much) else.

Now, with an MIT license, anyone can do with our code pretty much what they want, which was, of course, intentional. But what we would *PREFER* is that people wouldn't screw with our base distro. That the stuff that we provide would be a package. Distro makers can/should add other apps, art work, sounds, whatever, but keep the base, core distribution intact. That will mean that apps, etc will continue to work on every distro without recompiling. Thus avoiding the nastiness that has come about in the Linux realm where there is so much hassle with that stuff.

I think this is the beginning of the end. If we continue like this I am very sure Haiku will quietly disappear.
If we don't make a capable distro, others (similar to opportunist S. Jobs) will simply take the whole code and build itself a distro. It will then take some capable people from Haiku Org much like yellowTab did (hell, for a 1000Euro/$ I would happily sign) and Haiku.org would simply go out of men, men which all these years have accumulated a lot of experience and deep understanding of the parts they are working at.
For example, I wrote a new, full featured, clean, capable window manager. What if, I will not commit this piece of code and decide to go by myself, maybe in collaboration with other Haiku.org developers, and ship a 40-50$ distro. With the few, busy men that you have left it will take you at least 2 months before having a full capable window manager, not even considering that you loose some important mens which would hugely increase the gap between us.

I'll tell you what I think... I think some of you have already discussed about a 40-50$ distro. That's normal because all this time that you/we have invested in this project must rewarded somehow. Also Haiku being an US organization you can't include a lot of codecs for playing audio and video files, which simply undermine the term of Media(/Desktop) OS.

Also, this being an MIT project you can't protect code from being stolen. If we DON't ship a VERY capable distro, we are set for extinction. Knowing the fact that Haiku can't ship a free distro with a lot of codecs and programs bundled, I think we should offer two, almost identical distros: 1) Haiku-OS Personal - free - having a the most needed free programs/codecs, and 2) Haiku-OS Pro - 40-50$ - having the most needed free *& commercial* programs/codes.


bye,
Adi.

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