Haiku OS Is Stepping Closer To Its Beta

[edwaleni]

The moment IBM poured 1 billion $ in Linux around 2000 to kill the UNIX competition on the low-margin market, "Linux" was not a "hobby OS" anymore: the double quotes are indeed very "à propos".
Even nowadays, some people insist on calling "Linux" a "hobby OS", -- "developed by volunteers in their spare time for the sake of freedom" --, while it is funded by major IT companies (nowadays 95 % of the kernel work by Intel, AMD, Oracle, Red Hat, Samsung, IBM, etc.. + all the userland work by Red Hat etc..), and was also built on academic work in the past 20+ years.

"Linux" is the dominant system with a vibrant ecosystem and a very efficient business model: fair enough, but anyone is entitled to use another system and contribute to its development.

I can only be happy for the Haiku community if their project moves forward.
Even if Haiku is a "hobby OS", it does not diminish the community's efforts and achievements.

Some people here seem to enjoy bashing other systems systematically, I do not get the point ...
It is really funny to see people claiming to support "Linux" and open source, both about "freedom of choice", and being so intolerant otherwise on these forums (not in this particular thread).

Thank you Michael for shedding a light now and then on alternative/hobby systems.

(I use Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and illumos, recognize their respective qualities and do not feel like bashing anybody based on their uname)

Agreed.

As one who had to work with the silliness of the UNIX wars of the 1990's, IBM's pouring of dough into Linux and the creation of Red Hat to commercialize the support were key to the transition. It clearly pushed out the marginals like SCO, Unix Ware, System V and now Solaris, While HP/UX and AIX are still around as well as BSD.

[Mabhatter]

Congratumalations, Haiku, you're that much closer to emulating BeOS, from 1991!

BeOS 5.1 is from 1998. It is a tale of what could have been, and they tried very hard. It was FAR better than Windows 95-98 of the time for a desktop, but it went up against M$ and lost. It was almost purchased by Apple as BeOS had many cross-company contacts with Apple... but Apple bought NEXT from that Steve Jobs guy instead. They tried for embedded apps, but lost to QNX and ended up at Palm... which died horribly. A good number of engineers ended up at Apple in later years and many ideas tried out in BeOS are in the modern MacOS.

Haiku is one of the few hobby operating systems that's almost completely working as they've replaced proprietary BeOS modules one at a time because BeOS made this much easier than other OSes with its micro kernel-modular design... again, from 1998.

I'm a fan but haven't tried it out in a while. I still have a boxed copy of BeOS and GoBe Productive in a box somewhere I bought when it was briefly sold in stores.

[edwaleni]

In 2001 Be's copyrights were sold to Palm, Inc. for some $11 million. BeOS R5 is considered the last official version, but BeOS R5.1 "Dano", which was under development before Be's sale to Palm and included the BeOS Networking Environment (BONE) networking stack, was leaked to the public shortly after the company's demise.^[12][13]

In 2002, Be Inc. sued Microsoft claiming that Hitachi had been dissuaded from selling PCs loaded with BeOS, and that Compaq had been pressured not to market an Internet appliance in partnership with Be. Be also claimed that Microsoft acted to artificially depress Be Inc.'s initial public offering (IPO).^[14] The case was eventually settled out of court for $23.25 million with no admission of liability on Microsoft's part.^[15]

After the split from Palm, PalmSource used parts of BeOS's multimedia framework for its failed Palm OS Cobalt product.^[16] With the takeover of PalmSource, the BeOS rights now belong to Access Co