Andrea “hawksmoor” Scatena interviewed me a bit ago for Beyond Magazine : “BeOS, AmigaOS, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD.” He wanted to know my thoughts about the various BeOS variants floating around today. Pulled no punches in my answers. In fact, I was so candid I half-expected them not to run it, but they did. Current issue is downloadable now (PDF).
Be had more than 100 employees and $25 million in the bank at one point. Full-time engineers and a bunch of committed commercial developers (Adamation, BeatWare, Gobe…). With all of that, BeOS barely stood a snowball’s chance in hell. Without any of that, without any hope of developing momentum — EVER — it’s all so much less than zero. It’s very hard for me to understand why there are still people hanging out in the ghost town.
and:
Look, sometimes we do things in this life for irrational reasons, for love. If you love BeOS and don’t care about the apps or the practicality, then by all means use it, be happy, it’s “all part of life’s rich pageant.” Just don’t start to think BeOS is going to have some kind of renaissance, or take over the world, or provide a means for developers or users to make money. Love is the only remaining reason to use the system. And maybe that’s reason enough.
Andrea is a good guy. His commitment and love is shining – exactly the kind of vibe that made the BeOS community unlike any technology sphere I’ve experienced before or since.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way about BeOS. It was a good OS. Those who feel like it can use it if they want – nothing binary ever really dies so long as there’s hardware to run it – but I’m with you, I don’t think the open source versions of it will amount to anything as an OS.
And I think there are so many zealots around that you won’t see any useful derivations, either, like the windowserver being split off and made into a replacement for X.
Tired of zealots, tired of *being* a zealot only to be flatly disappointed by corporate realities, I use a mac because it makes me happy, and technological superiority (or not) be damned.
-Jim
Ran across this today, don’t know if this is a site you frequent, thought you might be interested. The article’s titled “A Peek at PhOS: BeOS-Dan0’s Unapproved Brother.”
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6948