Yeah; BeOS was a great desktop operating system. The project described here lasted for a while, but the open source replication of BeOS was not able to happen fast enough for me to keep using the BeOS core indefinitely and eventually I had to switch back to more well-known operating systems.
That said, although it took a long time, the folks who kept working directly on the open source replacement for BeOS did eventually manage to produce a very good system that’s actually very usable now. It’s called Haiku, and I’m writing this note from a laptop running it.
It’s marvelous.
It has a package management system that, like the project described below, is largely based on the ideas behind the BSD ports systems; I kinda want to dig up a copy of the ReOS package manager code to see how well it would run now.
An old post of mine from Kuro5hin.Org, dated “Thu Feb 28th, 2002 at 12:36:43 AM EST”.
As readers may know, the OpenNIC got its start from an article and its discussion here on K5. I’m happy to say that I’ve just released the alpha version of a software project which will be distributed and managed based on another article.
ReOS (or here, for non-OpenNIC browsers) is not, I would guess, in itself going to be particularly interesting to the majority of readers here, since it’s a BeOS program and the core of a new Linux-style distribution being built from the free Personal Edition of BeOS and the Open Source replacement components as they’re written. To my knowledge, there are only a few of us here on K5 who use BeOS.
Of more interest is the ownership and business model involved, which is based directly on the article titled Collective Patronage published here a year ago. Now we’ll have a chance to see how the comparisons I made against the commercial and Open Source/Free Software models actually play out in a real test.
