yellowTAB has announced that they are making Zeta’s user license more family-friendly. Under the new license clause, members of a single family residing in the same household can use a single copy of Zeta on multiple computers for non-commercial purposes. Elsewhere, Adi Oanca of the Haiku OS project is participating on the App/Interface Kit development and HaikuNews interviewed him.
Zeta license is now family-friendly; Haiku Interview
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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reminds me of Gobe Productive’s move, a couple of years ago.
And what’s better than being family-friendly? Family, as a “fortress of well-being”, as some call it, deserves some recognition by sw vendors. Shame on Microsoft for never coming to such an idea. They could even afford it, easy.
It’s not about whether or not they could afford it, it’s about if they need to do it to sell more copies, and they do not.
And very useful. I wish MS would do that same with XP home.
Apple already let’s people buy family versions of their software.
>>>I wish MS would do that same with XP home.
I know it’s not the same, but if you read the Office license, Microsoft does allow retail copies of Office to be installed in a home computer and a laptop simultaneously.
What are *you* talking about. Joseph’s comment made perfect sense. BeOS, which was closed source and commercial, got a significantly-sized and dedicated userbase that was left high-and-dry when Be went under. Nobody picked up the code, and there was no migration path for them. Since the source wasn’t available, the users couldn’t go and maintain the OS on their own. This has happened many times before (Amiga, OS/2, etc), with other closed-source OSs.
As a user who got burned by Be’s demise, I’ve reached the conclusion that closed-source is a very undesirable property for OSs. Unless you’re sure that your OS vendor won’t go anywhere in the next decade (MS is pretty much the only one that big), and OS is too critical a piece of software to trust to a single company. It’s a big enough pain to have to replace application software (got burned by the Wordperfect too), but replacing an OS is a much bigger PITA. Plus, unlike application software, OSs suffer from bit-rot — my copy of Wordperfect 6 works just fine today, but my copy of BeOS 5 needs patches to install on modern machines.
Open-source is what makes Haiku possible. As long as there is some minimal level of interest in an idea, a project can continue, and be nurtured to the point where it gains some larger appeal.
…Forks are always a good thing, they offer users and developers more choice…
Ok, so I cherry picked that line, but it just stood out.
Fact of the matter is that forking is NOT always a good thing. Most of the time forks come down to bad management, lack of clear objectives, or outright personality clash. Rarely a fork will produce better end results than its parent, but usually they both stagnate thanks to division of resources and userbase.
I’m not saying developers should confine themselves to never forking, but I will say that there should be a damn good reason to fork. Otherwise all that happens is sourceforge gets another empty project page.
Things like the new X are the exception, not the rule.
***
I like the family license thing. Doesn’t really sound totally equal though does it.
“I paid £20 for my copy, and I only have 2 kids. That tart across the street paid the same and has 12. She’s getting more value for money than me!” :>
Interesting idea. Does free stuff get more free if you use it more.
I’ve heard it all before, how OSS will save the world, however don’t expect me to keep on reading this evangelizing on every post over YellowTab or Microsoft. What’s the point?
This is worse than a salesman. At least those only hype their product, not trash everyone elses.
This is OSNews, and I guess is safe to bet that pretty much everyone knows that advantages and disadvantages of close source software and open source software. Why insist?
But hey, maybe I’m wrong, and I’m the only one bothered with it and that found it pointless and trollish. I’ll just go away silently.
Gein
P.S.: The mod down request was to my own comment. Just to make it clear, because my english isn’t very good.
Realistically, even if you have the source code for BeOS — chances are that you won’t be able to find qualified volunteers to continue improving it.
OS writing is a very specialized disclipine. Go and look back at the discussions that openbeos volunteers had a few years ago, Eugenia’s husband was literally covering his mouth not laughing out loud on how little these people know about OS writing.
Don’t worry. Not everybody is drinking the “FOSS can save the world” koolaid. It’s just the freaks that think they’ve found religion or something.
Raynier makes a somewhat valid argument with his BeOS comment. It’s a shame that the code couldn’t have been opened up because now the Haiku developers are trying to recreate the past and people don’t want to live in the past.
Wow, that’s further along than I would have thought it would be. Although I guess developers, in general, do have a tendency to underestimate the work left to be done.
I look forward to reading about future developments here. They must be close to a point where they can run significant demonstrations of the Haiku app_server functionality.
Besides, every current implementation could be considered a fork of a previous idea
Well, don’t say that too loud, SCO (TSG) might hear you and use it in one of their cases….
Imagine a world where TSG/SCO could sue everyone?!?!
Starved developer will fork for food.
Still waiting to hear if Yellowtab have the kernel source, though.. as there’s no point in buying an OS which is stuck at its present position with little hope of any advance.
They always avoid answering that question…..
The interview is very interesting because it states that haiku will not be ready before at least a year. This leaves Beos users (how many still here) only one option : Zeta.
Why is this going so slowly ? because most devs working on the project do it as a hobby. I think supporting Zeta is the best option today to get haiku tomorow : YT’s business plan needs Haiku, so when they won’t be able to progress on their own on zeta they’ll pay fulltime developers to work on haiku.
ludovic
—
http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/blog/
“”Still waiting to hear if Yellowtab have the kernel source, though.. as there’s no point in buying an OS which is stuck at its present position with little hope of any advance.
They always avoid answering that question…..””
It’s probably safe to assume they don’t, since they have not fixed the 1gb RAM issue. From what I understand, and by all means I could be wrong, they’d need access to the kernel sources to legitimately fix this. Since it hasn’t been fixed, they either don’t have access, or don’t know how – neither is a good answer. I will purchase Zeta though, and donate to Haiku.
FYI:
http://www.yellowtab.com/support/faq/show.php?id=7
http://www.yellowtab.com/support/faq/show.php?id=5
please even READ WEBSITES before posting such garbage…
Dunno if you are posting in reference to my thoughts, but those links you posted say nothing about access to the kernel code. I’ve followed Beos and its derivitives since 1998, so I’m not just stumbling upon this website and dropping random thoughts without having read, including the yellowtab website. No one associated with YT has answered this question in a straightforward manner – they should be politicians.
Hi,
> At this time the core of the OS is based on proprietary code > that we cannot legally share.
this sounds like the core (kernel) to me.
> At this time the core of the OS is based on proprietary code > that we cannot legally share.
This sounds like he is avoiding whether HE actually has access to code. I cannot legally share the core of the OS either, doesn’t mean I have access to it.
Perhaps that will be Gobe Inc.’s legacy. They were the first company I can recall that pushed the “every PC in your home” license. You could even use GoBeProductive on one PC at work.
This leaves Beos
users (how many still here) only one option : Zeta.
WTF is with you people? WHY would beos users only option be zeta? zeta *aka dano with crap bolted on* gives you little over r5.0.3 that has been upgraded with like BONE, the usb mass storage drivers, agp support, haiku stuff as its finished etc.
Only reason ANYONE would use zeta is if plain old r5 wont run on thier hardware or they didn’t do any research before hand and just bought zeta because it looked good or something.
guess I’ll stop ranting now. I’ll probably get flamed.
Firstly, why was the post by someone called Joseph modded down? It contained nothing, IMO, that warranted that. Anyway, yellowTab had a legal agreement with Be Inc and this is extended to Palm since the demise of Be Inc and the sale of Be Inc’s IP and transfer of staff to Palm.
I still find it perplexing that so many people are so anti-yT gven that they are they only legal distributor of anything officially BeOS at this time.
Don’t get me wrong, i love BeOS with BONE and i really like PhOS
Site:
http://phosphorus.tk/ (currently hacked, but hopefully back soon)
Forums:
http://beoseh.neo-programmers.com/forum/index.php
OK yT have suffered from issues with translation from German to English but that’s been improving. And they have been actively working away, but the resources the have spent probably could have been spent working on drivers and bugs, but i have to commend them for one of the first fully functioning USB 2.0 stacks out there.
So, sit down. Smoke a pipe, pour a scotch and chill out.
I think the division in the BeOS community is unwarranted and based on impatience and frustration.
While you are waiting you might want to try the incredibly fast Linux distro called Yoper. http://www.yoper.com/ as a BeOS fan and demising BeOS developer http://www.bebits.com/devprofile/266 i highly recommend it.
Enjoy
peter
>>>Anyway, yellowTab had a legal agreement with Be Inc and this is extended to Palm since the demise of Be Inc and the sale of Be Inc’s IP and transfer of staff to Palm.
That’s not entirely correct.
Be Inc. had a german distributor to sell BeOS in Germany. Yellowtab bought all the unsold copies BeOS from that german distributor. As a BeOS distributor, you are allowed to bundle software with BeOS.
That’s it — there is no legal agreement bewtween yellowtab and Be Inc./Palm Inc. And this is from yellowtab’s website — yellowtab said that they were beginning to talk to Be Inc. about distributing Dano when BeOS was bought by Palm (and Palm never even answer yellowtab’s phone calls).
This is like how Lindows claimed that they had a development agreement with AOL/Netscape. It turns out that Lindows went to Netscape’s website, click “I agree” and downloaded the broswer —- and then Lindows claim that the “I agree” click is a development deal with AOL.
It got modded down because of OSnews rules.. my post probably broke about all but one of them in their/her opinion. Hopefully talking about forking code doesn’t break a rule.
Forks create a kind of system where only those that are very interested in continuing work, continue that work. It doesn’t prevent others for using the original software or even developers from staying with either fork. It doesn’t really prevent anything. If you look at the commercial world, Microsoft software is developed almost entirely out of forks. Software they purchased that they eventually transitioned to their own products. Hell, look at this article right here. We are talking about project forks right now!
I’m not sure why people have this horrible attitude towards forking. I think eventually all software will be easily customized towards exactly what the user wants. Not just at a configuration level but even at source/build level through automated interfaces. Imagine if you could login to a development system and have it generate software that matched the specs exactly for what you wanted to do, and only what you wanted to do. No mention of the names of software applications, libraries, operating systems, desktop environments, or even licenses. Just a 100% tailored system for your needs.
I think OSS and open policy towards code reuse is the only way to achieve the above. I said initially it is fine if these developers want to ‘protect’ their work. That is their prerogative. I just don’t think it’ll foster the environment I described above.
Realistically, even if you have the source code for BeOS — chances are that you won’t be able to find qualified volunteers to continue improving it.
Ehrr, obviously that statement must be wrong since not only did people wanna continue improve on stuff (Open Tracker is the best example here), but they even wanted to improve so badly they started from scratch after hearing palm refuse to sell the code.
OS writing is a very specialized disclipine. Go and look back at the discussions that openbeos volunteers had a few years ago, Eugenia’s husband was literally covering his mouth not laughing out loud on how little these people know about OS writing.
Yes and then I ask myself why you visit this site at all? Besides, how did Linux start development? Windows? One man projects from the start.
One guy even works at NASA for crying out loud who work with Haiku… how qualified can you get? The guys who develop had experience of coding before and now they have 3 more VERY active years of knowledge. I’m confident they’ll be able to do things just fine.
To back that statement up, their filesystem is obviously so darn good and complex that SkyOS chose to implement it rather than ReiserFS, ExtFS, UFS2 or whatever FS. Geee that’s pretty nice work of a n00b like Axel ain’t it.
Realistically, even if you have the source code for BeOS — chances are that you won’t be able to find qualified volunteers to continue improving it.
Ehrr, obviously that statement must be wrong since not only did people wanna continue improve on stuff (Open Tracker is the best example here), but they even wanted to improve so badly they started from scratch after hearing palm refuse to sell the code.
OS writing is a very specialized disclipine. Go and look back at the discussions that openbeos volunteers had a few years ago, Eugenia’s husband was literally covering his mouth not laughing out loud on how little these people know about OS writing.
Yes and then I ask myself why you visit this site at all? Besides, how did Linux start development? Windows? One man projects from the start.
One guy even works at NASA for crying out loud who work with Haiku… how qualified can you get? The guys who develop had experience of coding before and now they have 3 more VERY active years of knowledge. I’m confident they’ll be able to do things just fine.
To back that statement up, their filesystem is obviously so darn good and complex that SkyOS chose to implement it rather than ReiserFS, ExtFS, UFS2 or whatever FS. Geee that’s pretty nice work of a n00b like Axel ain’t it.
But it seems gobe.com has disappeared. 🙁
“I still find it perplexing that so many people are so anti-yT gven that they are they only legal distributor of anything officially BeOS at this time.”
No doubt for some it’s about idealism, but for me it’s just a refusal to be price gouged by Yellowtab. A $100 for Zetaa?? They’ve got to be kidding. $50 at most, I would pay for it, especially considering all the mediocre or negative reviews it’s gotten and that fact that the company probably has no future. I’m all for supporting them, but I won’t have them stick it to me like that. I’ll continue on with BeOS Max and soon PhOS lest they decide to become more reasonable.
As for legality, I haven’t seen any cease and desist from Palm, and so I won’t worry about it until they do.
yoper looks just like any other kde based distro, nothing like beos. try athene instead: http://www.rocklyte.com/athene
My point has nothing to do with “OSS saving the world.” My point is that OSS is a very good solution for products in markets that are otherwise too monopolized for a new product to develop fully. Microsoft basically owns the commercial OS market. Apple has managed to find their niche, and hang on at 2-3% for awhile. We have seen time after time that no other commercial OS can succeed in this market. Building a good desktop OS platform is a 10+ year project, and no company peddling a closed-source OS is going to last that long before their product takes off. OSS is a way to let the platform mature while not having to worry about the parent company tanking.
>>>Ehrr, obviously that statement must be wrong since not only did people wanna continue improve on stuff (Open Tracker is the best example here), but they even wanted to improve so badly they started from scratch after hearing palm refuse to sell the code.
>>>One guy even works at NASA for crying out loud who work with Haiku… how qualified can you get?
I already said that OS writing is a very SPECIALIZED discipline. Sure a lot of people “wanna continue” to improve the stuff — but if you read the old openbeos discussions, these volunteers didn’t have a clue on how OS writing really is. With or without the original beos source code, these volunteers wouldn’t have a clue either way.
There are “claims” that certain sections are what %age done. Remember that they didn’t even work on the kernel, it was somebody else’s kernel. Imagine all these volunteers got the source code of the beos kernel and that guy didn’t help, do you think that they have a clue on what’s going on.
There are a lot of people working at NASA and Andrew Bachmann may be smarter than all of us combined. Firstly, he is working on the java port, not the actual OS. Secondly Andrew works at NASA where “leading edge” means the space shuttle’s codes are basically 30 years old and you can’t change a thing because of safety concerns. Andrew does very specialized work at NASA and OS writing is a separate yet another very specialized discipline. You don’t ask a very smart cardiothorasic surgeon to do brain surgery.