Cubicgarden.com
Everyone is talking about HP’s announcement that WebOS is going open source… Which is great news and one of the best moves they could have done with WebOS. However I do wonder if WebOS might go the way of BeOS?
What I mean really is… by the time WebOS goes open source, will it be too late like I would conclude BeOS or rather haiku was/is…? Linux become the de-facto open source platform and BeOS took too long to finally become open source. HP really should be taking advantage of the fact there are a lot of people who bought Touchpads and Hackers are falling over themselves with the possibilities, now! Or at least sooner than 2013! Which would be a real shame because I actually quite like WebOS…
When I was young, when I was deciding what type of system I should use next after my ST. I had the choice of either the PC running Windows, Apple Macintosh running System 7 or a Sun Spark with some Unix system. I choose the PC with Windows in the end mainly due to cost and the ability to build my own. Linux at the time seemed too complex but there was another which I got very interested in at the time. BeOS.
Well BeOS has had quite a rollercoaster time and has been rebuilt from the ground up by developers applying the same ethics as Linux and BSD to BeOS. Now called Haiku, the alpha looks and feels usable enough to try in a virtual machine or play with on a spare machine. There’s also a live cd for that true test it and see experience.
I’ll be keeping an eye on Haiku because I think it could be come something worth using in the future, not that I’m saying anything bad about Linux. But options are always good and having another open source operating system is certainly good for the world.
