throwaway19567

I think that's a false dichotomy.

Some people enjoy building things. It's not performance art, it's a hobby. Can Haiku not be a hobby for people who enjoy hacking away at BeOS? (You might think I'm splitting hairs here, but performance art is precisely the wrong analogy to use, since performance art is for the benefit of others. Performance art is inherently public and assessable in terms of how it reaches others, unlike hobbies. Performance art is env=PROD.)

Was the purpose of Haiku ever utility? What do you define as utility? If I spend a day building a shelf, does that have more or less utility than buying a shelf from IKEA? What if I like making shelves? What if I like making OSes? Does the shelf (/OS) that I build have less utility than the one from IKEA (/MS)?

In economics, utility is a measure of individual satisfaction. The person who likes tinkering with Haiku is deriving cold hard economic utility from Haiku right now. What should it matter to this person whether you find Haiku web scale and production ready? John Q Public is never going to run Haiku, no matter how much polish you throw at it. Why rush to some goal line that doesn't exist in the first place?

Mac OS X binaries are the most susceptible to bit rot of any major OS. There's constant platform churn, all of it closed source, and there's nowhere near the community that exists around emulating older Windows.

You can reliably run DOS, Win, Linux applications of almost any vintage with the right translation layer / emulator, but there's a black hole of MacOS apps circa 2002-2012 that just no longer runs on anything, even later Intel Macs.

I used to enjoy a cute little Pacman clone called Pac the Man X, for example, and I just don't know how I could run this today. Seems to reliably take down any emulator I've thrown at it - presumably it's using some kind of graphics acceleration that's not emulated. (Suggestions welcome.)

> It's a bit arbitrary in the sense that Microsoft and Apple could dodge the requirement by simply becoming open source, but that's not going to happen so it's not really a problem.

Considering macOS is already built on an OSS kernel (Darwin), and that Apple no longer charges any money for OS upgrades, I could imagine a world where Apple just shuffles some components around and announces macOS is now fully open source. Just so happens to require a lot of Apple chips with proprietary firmware, but hey that's for security reasons. Trusted enclave and all that. Nothing to see here. We'll take the exemptions for FOSS now please.

(Of course the real reason Apple won't do this is that they already have almost all of their user's ages via Apple ID, and being a trusted age-auth intermediary actually plays to their core strengths really well.)