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My favourite tech "what if?" is the open-sourcing of all of BeOS in 2000, which I have heard was talked about internally. The main parts of the GUI, the file ma
by rvense 9y ago
My favourite tech "what if?" is the open-sourcing of all of BeOS in 2000, which I have heard was talked about internally. The main parts of the GUI, the file manager and "dock", were actually released under an MIT-like license near the end of the company.
This would have meant a stable, easy-to-install graphical OS available back when KDE and GNOME were still at version 1 or 2.
- ghaff 9y ago2000 was probably too late. Linux was already being widely used for Internet infrastructure and IBM was in the process of embracing it. There were opportunities for the operating system space to play out differently--which in turn could have changed a lot of industry dynamics--but those scenarios are things like: 1.) BSD coalescing earlier and somehow avoiding the legal issues with AT&T. (And I'm not sure to what degree this would have changed the final outcome with BSD substituted for Linux.) 2.) Sun open sourcing Solaris earlier in a surprise move against Windows NT. (Hard to see this happening.)
- jacobush 9y agoWith a significant following of rabid Amiga fans. Not sure about the net gain of that, though. :-)
- memsom 9y agoOpen-sourcing would have left massive holes in the OS. A lot of code under the hood was licensed. Remove all that and at best you'd probably have a kernel and not much of the UI, networking, graphics subsystem, media kit etc. The OS didn't have a full screen command line past the kernel debugger. So, yeah, not very useful. I'm going to be honest - it was probably not worth it to employ someone to trawl through the code to clean it up. Given the Be Inc business model failed and both PalmSource and ACCESS seems to have faded in to obscurity - I get the feeling no one was going to pay for that.