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I don't see what the problem would be for you as an end user, unless your objection is purely ideological.

Not directly as an end user perhaps, but it will affect your selection of apps considering that unless there's a license exception for syllable's libs that I missed, it's effectively impossible to write a non-GPL app for Syllable, which will turn off a lot of third party devs. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You are wrong.

Most of Syllable source code is not under the GPL but the LGPL.

It is perfectly possible to write proprietary applications for Syllable. But don't expect to get a large following from that.

Ah, thanks. I couldn't find anything on the site indicating that, so it seemed as if all of it was GPL only. Appreciate the clarification.

You seem to be quite mistaken.

Linux, for example, also has many proprietary programs. If they aren't as many as in Windows, the fault is to find in the companies you seem to favor - they just seem to be prefering supporting Windows.

Actually, with your reasonning, you should on the contrary be thankfull to all the GPL applications because they generously fill the void let by proprietary applications.

Just a question : where have you been the last 30 years?

ok here's a question. Will it go under GPL 3?

Probably not. We're happy enough with the GPL2 and the license retains the "or later" clause, so others are free to use the code under GPL3 if they wish.

Well, for one, Syllable will run all by itself. Haiku isn't self hosting yet. You still have to use core parts from BeOS PE

"Well, for one, Syllable will run all by itself. Haiku isn't self hosting yet. You still have to use core parts from BeOS PE"

It's true that Haiku can't yet compile on Haiku, but it does run all by itself.

Edited 2007-07-06 22:00

Yes, Haiku is not yet self-hosting, in the sense that building it is done primarily in BeOS or Linux. Haiku is not yet stable/complete enough to survive building itself. (You have I believe 150.000 files, post-build. Haiku itself is rather lean, currently only 1500 files.)

No, Haiku does not need anything from BeOS. Unless you count OpenTracker, the BeOS desktop which Be open-sourced.

Well that's a lot of it right there. Haiku's philosophy (from my perspective anyway) is that BeOS was awesome so we should revive it in open source form. It currently maintains both source and binary compatibility with BeOS and sticks closely to the BeOS look and feel. There are a few advantages to this approach: they don't need to design an API (though internal design issues remain), existing BeOS applications will run on it without modification, and it has a built-in userbase of BeOS devotees.

Syllable has a somewhat different philosophy. It's trying to be the best desktop OS it can be. It takes a lot of inspiration from BeOS because BeOS did a lot of things right, but it's continually diverging away from BeOS and is not locked to any of BeOS's design decisions. This is a blessing and a curse. It gives the developers a lot of freedom to do things better than they've been done before in other operating systems, but it means it doesn't run existing BeOS applications. Lack of software is definately Syllable's biggest weakness at the moment, but it is steadily improving as Vanders mentions in the interview.

From a practical perspective, Syllable is significantly more stable and has better hardware support than Haiku currently does, or at least that has been my impression (I have not personally used Haiku). Haiku also has a rather nasty choice ahead of them. The C++ ABI (or at least the name mangling scheme) used by GCC changed between version 2 (which BeOS uses) and all later versions starting with 3. So they either need to stick with old creaky GCC 2, break binary compatibility with BeOS or produce their own custom version of GCC 4 (or 3 I suppose) that is ABI compatible with 2.