Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

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I've played with Haiku in a VM in the past. But what is suggested that I do with the OS? Be a daily driver? Does it fit some niche use case? I have an old netbook, I'd load Haiku on the boot partition, I really would. I'm a sucker for something different (given the evils of Big OS and all), and for the underdog. Hell, I might even contribute if I have something (coding wise) to give.

So I load 'er up on the ol' boot partion and...what? Music production? Just a lightweight, novel web surfing machine? Someone, anyone, give me a reason to spend my weekend farting around with OS installs.

Counter to that, should the answer be, "meh, it's just something novel to play with", then why are the devs pouring time into it? I guess I'm trying to politely say I kinda don't get the point. (But maybe a good answer to question #1 can help.)

EDIT: thanks much for the answers. Very helpful, if for no other reason than confirming that there isn't the answer. Now to go blow the dust off that old MSI Wind.

It's a general-purpose OS. Do whatever you normally do on it.

More importantly, it's a learning tool. It's been part of many courses and many rounds of Google Summer of Code. It's an embeddable kernel + OS free of the cancerous GPL, under a permissive MIT licence. It is extremely well documented, well tested, and consistent. Writing drivers for it is very simple. This makes it interesting for education, for-profit development, embedded applications, etc...

It's also just fun. There is a very active forum[1], wiki[2], and community[3] that has been spiting out hobby OSs for a decade. The kernel originally used in Haiku is from NewOS, a project by Travis Geiselbrecht that was also just a hobby project.

[1]: http://forum.osdev.org/

[2]: http://wiki.osdev.org/

[3]: irc://chat.freenode.net:6667/#osdev

Just because you don't like a licenses obligations does not make the license cancerous.

People that call it cancerous are doing that only because they want to get peoples work and do not want to give back any work they do on the GPL'd software or the software that uses the GPL'd code.

The agency I used to work at didn't mind using GPL'd software at all, because with one or two exceptions the agency did not distribute software at all. The AGPL was different matter though, so we just didn't use software licensed under AGPL. I am not complaining that software uses the AGPL license, it's all the better for software developers to license it the way they want, there's no point in whining about it.

I would tend to license software under the GPL just so that any improvements made to it go back to the community.

> Just because you don't like a licenses obligations does not make the license cancerous.

Considering that I often hear GPL (and other copyleft licenses) described by its proponents as a virus, I don't think the disease metaphor is out of the question. The whole idea is that to maintain license compatibility in derivative works you need to propagate the license.

I don't feel strongly about copyleft, though I generally don't use it for my own works.

>Do whatever you normally do on it.

What I normally do involves a lot of software that does not run on Haiku. Is there a Citrix receiver for it? Does Cisco make an AnyConnect client? What about LibreOffice? Java? Flash?

I love the idea of Haiku, don't get me wrong. But the question of "what can I do with it" is not answered by "whatever you normally do", especially if (considering your second paragraph) what I normally do does not entail writing device drivers. An OS means nothing without compatible software. Ask anyone who uses Windows Phone.

There may be particular cases that don't work for you. Just like how up the gaming experience on OS X is still garbage after a decade.

- Citrix = https://wiki.winehq.org/Haiku + https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio... [GOLD]

- AnyConnect = OpenConnect

- LibreOffice = This is a good one, there is a port but the general community does not favour porting it because it clashes pretty hard against the BeOS ethos. I would just use google docs. I do almost all my editing including ppts in vim.

- In 5 years I haven't found a need for Java. In the one case it would have been useful for RE work I just wrote a python library to do it instead [https://github.com/tktech/Jawa]

- Same with flash. Haven't run into anything that needed flash in years.

Having apps/suites that only work in one particular environment and aren't available on yours are nothing new. Hasn't stopped the continued development of OS X or Linux that eventually results in ports or alternatives.

> the gaming experience on OS X is still garbage after a decade.

My main use for PCs for almost 2 decades was gaming, and after switching to Macs a few years ago, I can't say I miss much, honestly.

Unless you're complaining about the cost of a Mac, almost every new game has a Mac version on release or soon after launch, and even if it doesn't, CrossOver [1] or another VM will let you play it without having to boot into Windows.

Metal is also proving to be good for native games. [2]

[1] https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-mac

[2] http://www.cio.com/article/3097642/os-x/macos-metal-api-make...

> free of the cancerous GPL, under a permissive MIT licence

Is this attitude common in the Haiku community? I was interested in checking it out but seeing this sort of rhetoric is discouraging.

I can't say I speak for the “Haiku community” short of being friends with some of the developers and hanging in the IRC channel, but … no that's not a common attitude. Haiku prefers non-copyleft licenses, but doesn't avoid the GPL like cancer. Heck the default compiler is GCC (and will be for the foreseeable future) and the web browser uses WebKit.

That's good to know—thanks! Also good to hear that there are modern browsers available for Haiku :) I think I'll try it out on my old netbook.

There was a lot of effort a couple years ago to fully port WebKit including HTML5 video, audio, etc. NetSurf also runs on Haiku, if you want something lighter weight but with enough rendering support for most sites.

That's just reality. In general the GPL is perceived extremely negatively. Almost every company I've worked for has had strict audits to ensure nothing we do or even previously worked on has touched anything potentially GPL.

If you're writing software for fun, enjoy seeing it being used, and still want attribution you licence it under the MIT or BSD, not the GPL. Many people get polarized on the topic and there are many discussion on stackoverflow and around where people seek or design MIT-like, GPL-incompatible licence specifically. Likewise, the GPL has its own cult following.

Regardless of personal opinions, few if any commercial entities willing want to work with the GPL.

The linux kernel proves you wrong.

It does not, at all. Working with the only available option is not the same thing as wanting to work with it.

Read the mailing list and driver discussions. This conversation is repeated twice a week. They HATE working around the GPL.

Not to mention uboot, busybox, etc.

That doesn't really answer my question. I've seen this flame war before and am not really interested in fighting it again, hence my asking whether it comes up a lot in Haiku-land.

I guess a better way to start a conversation would be to point at all the effort and argumentation wasted over where the line between GPLed kernel modules and non-GPLed kernel modules is in the Linux kernel, as well as runtime disadvantages in some cases. The efforts to get ZFS encryption on Linux are a good recent example of this problem: they had to port the in-kernel crypto implementation from Illumnos (basically OpenSolaris) even though the Linux kernel has a perfectly good implementation of AES-GCM that would've worked without bloating the kernel modules.

Add to that the resistance to forming stable ABIs (and sometime APIs) in part to push everyone to not only license any kernel module as GPL, but to also commit it to the one true kernel sources, and I think there's at least a discussion worth having. But definitely not one to be started with "cancerous GPL".

> then why are the devs pouring time into it

The goal of Haiku is to revive BeOS in open-source so that it might never die again. It's simply a recreation of BeOS R5 with some modernness thrown in.

I think the developers are intelligent enough to be aware that their OS might not have a future of taking on Apple or Microsoft.

If you want a comparison, this is similar to how Linux came to be. Linus was frustrated at MINIX licensing, so he set out to make his own.

There was a post somewhere where they realized it was going nowhere in terms of turning into a real OS. They have no delusions. They said something like they mainly saw its value in experimentation, learning, fun.

The installation is very fast since it just copies package files which are read-only images mounted at boot.

1) download anyboot nighly image

2) dd to sacrifical flash drive

3) boot from it and install

Once installed you can use https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/daily-tasks/updating-system to upgrade the system

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