SkyOS & BranchFS

[Nothinman]

1. I don't believe the license has barely any of the clauses in it that the GPL does. Putting something under a BSD license pretty much leaves it as free as the creator wanted it to be.
2. I don't think the BSD license can be revoked, so versions 1 and 2 should still be available in whatever form they were previously, assuming they're free as in generally what we think of free, freely redistributable and all.

Pretty much, although there's nothing requiring that the author keep making BSD licensed stuff available forever so there's no problem in him taking it down. But anyone can take that code and do whatever they want with it.

 

[zizban]

Pretty much, although there's nothing requiring that the author keep making BSD licensed stuff available forever so there's no problem in him taking it down. But anyone can take that code and do whatever they want with it.

I've heard of people who have the code and I've seen bits of it but I don't have it.

 

[zizban]

I can't speak about Apple but MS at least released RC2 of Vista for free to anyone who wanted it.

Release Candidate, yes, but not the betas of Vista.

Probably is an educated guess coming from experience, not my ass. There's no way one man can compete with the army of developers that MS and Apple have. Even Linux which now has thousands of developers took like 10 years before anyone but unix admins even considered it for desktop use.

How do you know? This is just something you are guessing at.

Sure you did, you used HURD and Syllable as examples of OSes that suck but are bigger projects that have more developers and opened source and essentially said "Look, they've been working on that for almost 20 years and it still sucks so it's not a big deal if SkyOS sucks too since it's younger and has less developers."

Read what I wrote again. No essentially about it:

SkyOS has been in beta for a while but this nothing compared to how long OSes such as GNU HURD and Syllable have been in beta (decades) and they are open source!

Again, I was comparing the gestation times.

You don't know either and that's my point. All it takes is for Robert to lose interest and poof the project is gone and any time and money that you've invested.

Any application can go poof and vanish at any time. History is littered with examples.

Some student and thousands of other people helping him. Linux still hasn't made any significant inroads into the desktop and neither has OS X. As great a programmer as I think Linus is Linux wouldn't have gone anywhere if Linux wasn't GPL'd and BSD didn't have those legal issues at the time. But the timing just happened to work that Linux filled a niche because BSD was a gray area and all other forms of unix cost money. Now we've got an abundance of freely available OSes under varying licenses and 2 main commercial desktop OSes and you think a 3rd commercial OS will go anywhere? Most people already avoid Linux and OS X because of Windows software/game support so why would SkyOS be any different?

Who knows? You are mixing opinion with speculation.

 

[Nothinman]

Release Candidate, yes, but not the betas of Vista.

They also have a lot of beta stuff out there, I think being a beta tester is free for most things but for the bigger stuff like Vista you have to be selected.

http://beta.microsoft.com/availableconnections.aspx
http://get.live.com/betas/home

How do you know? This is just something you are guessing at.

You're just showing blind faith in the project. What I believe is based on what's happened to other OSes. Just look at device driver issues in various OSes. Writing a driver for hardware that you don't own is difficult enough but a lot of companies aren't willing to release specs so the device has to be reverse engineered. And he won't be able to look at the Linux drivers because he can't put GPL'd code into his system.

Read what I wrote again. No essentially about it:

Then reword it because that's what I got out of it.

Again, I was comparing the gestation times.

Which is irrelevant. Any one thing, related or not, can affect the speed of a project. Hell if Robert gets sick SkyOS could be on hold indefinitely since he's the only developer. The only thing being a sole developer saves him from is infighting.

Any application can go poof and vanish at any time. History is littered with examples.

Not OSS applications, the source is out there so no matter what the original authors decide to do someone else can always pick up the pieces and maintain them.

Who knows? You are mixing opinion with speculation.

Of course I am since SkyOS hasn't actually done anything yet. But the fact remains that Linus had and still has thousands of people helping him as do the Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu, etc projects. Linux was developed by just one man for only a few months and a lot of the core stuff that we take for granted now (i.e. portability, SMP support, high memory, drivers, etc) were done by other people because he didn't have the inclination or the hardware. So it's a pretty safe bet that if Linux wasn't GPL'd it would have made a much smaller impact.

 

[zizban]

It's obvious to me you have your mind made up. If want more info go to #skyos on Freenode. Thank you.

 

[Nothinman]

It's obvious to me you have your mind made up.

The same is true for you and you haven't made any compelling arguments as to why I or anyone else should change our mind.