Making Haiku Free Software

Of course you still have the freedom to use non-free software, even on a free software operating system. The only thing the FSF will do is teach you that by doing so you are giving up other (possibly more important) freedoms.

You said you prefer to use open source software instead of closed source software. Please remember that the amount of quality open source software that we have today would not exist without the efforts of Richard Stallman, the person you dislike. ;)

In the past 10 years, the only operating system I've had installed on my personal computer (besides Haiku) is Linux. Therefore, Linux is perfectly usable as a desktop OS. Why is that funny?

...Also, I apologize if the phrase "perfectly usable" is confusing. I meant the definition (from the wiktionary): "sufficient to satisfy a requirement". Linux is sufficient to satisfy my requirement as a desktop OS. :)

Mint, Mageia, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, Arch, PCLinuxOS, and so on. All of these distribtions have a goal to make (among other things) a Linux desktop operating system. Do we have different definitions of "Linux on the desktop"?

No, they don't get on my nerves, and no, the thought of being able to purchase, install, and use Microsoft Windows does does not make using Linux harder for me. I use Linux because it is the best operating system for what I want to do, and has the software applications that I want to use.

Oh. My opinion is different. There's a lot about Microsoft Windows that I find amateurish and inconsistent.

Anyway, I agree that the Haiku developers certainly have accomplished a lot. I think the relatively small number of developers plus having a unified goal ("recreate the BeOS") has helped very much.

*high five*

I think the ultimate point is that the goals of the Haiku developers overlaps somewhat with the FSF, but not entirely. The main point of Haiku being open-source is to prevent it dying as BeOS did. At the same time, I'm pretty happy with BSD licenses and, for that matter, the FreeBSD philosophy, as opposed to the GNU/Linux way of doing things. A large part of the Haiku design is about simplicity, consistency, and good user-design. Making Haiku "distributions" doesn't even make much sense compared to Linux distros. And forks at this point would merely divide and minimize scarce programmer and developer resources.

FSF is a joke in my opinion, linux is a huge mess (i do use linux for the last 10 years, though) the distro war is a nice thing to see and it also shows the flaw of that type of development. a distro uses an ABI/api and another distro uses the same ABI but a diferent APi,they fork respectively the API and follow a new path so does happens for the original ABI making it so different that it isn't compatible any more. well looking at that, it really makes me giggle to think that FSF will/would sponsors Haiku.

Haiku is just fine as it is i would never change it's development structure or license. I would discourage the idea of distro simply it would slow down the haiku dev cycle. if you want to make FSF approved or sponsored OS better off with linux or forking haiku for that matter.

Yes, Haiku and Linux is not comparable as Haiku is a 'full' operating system while Linux is just a 'kernel'.

And while the Linux kernel has a great deal of functionality (more than Haiku's equivalent will ever have I'm sure), it needs lots of other software components in order to make it an operating system.

This is where Linux distro's come in. They are for all intents and purposes separate operating systems with one defining factor which is that they all use the Linux kernel (in practice this typically includes glibc, GCC etc aswell).

They often share many other components between them aswell, but there is no 'rule' which defines a 'standard' as there are often numerous alternatives for each and every component.

Haiku on the other hand is developed as a 'whole' operating system, this makes it much less flexible than Linux and it's surrounding components, but also brings a much more (in my opinion) 'cohesive' environment where all components have been written to directly interface with eachother rather than being glued together as is often the case with Linux distro components.

And while the flexible Linux model has great advantages for many different uses (which is why Linux is so huge in so many different areas of computing), it stands to reason that when you are targeting a single area as Haiku is doing (the end user desktop), a 'whole' system written top-down for that single purpose will be superior.

All I can say is that my nerves are shot from listening to Richard Stallmans endless blah blah blah.

Bblah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah! bblah blah blah.

FTFSF >> Even bigger FTRICHARDSTALLMAN'SBLAHBLAHBLAH.

Talk about "crying wolf". Even the Grand Canyon couldn't shut that up! It's quite possibly the only human voice audible from space!

J/K thought we could all use a bit of humour, eh!

[quote=strypey]I think it's really sad that so many of those commenting here have not even taken the time to read and understand my original posting, or even tried to answer the reasonable questions that I've asked. I'm not sure what they think is gained by lashing out at me, Stallman, the FSF, the GPL, copyleft, Linux etc.[/quote] Our general FAQ should probably be enhanced with appropriate answers to your reasonable questions. Bye, Jerome

Let me try...

We are not going to switch to the GPL. We use the 2-clause MIT license, which is compatible with it, for the code we write. This decision was made when the project started so the code could be reused in an eventual continuation of the original BeOS. This didn't really happen, but I think projects like Zeta used some of the code. There were some patches for BeOS based on Haiku code as well.

One of the initial goals of the project was to provide an OS to people trying to run (or sell) their proprietary applications written for BeOS. There is one succesful example of this with TuneTracker Systems. For this reason, our point of view about free software is quite different from the FSF one. Have you tried one of the Linux versions they advertise? You will quickly notice that you likely can't connect to Wifi without first installing a "binary blob" firmware for your Wifi adapter. This is why Haiku includes them. We think the most important thing is that people can use the computer, and if there is no other solution than including a binary blob, we go for that.

We also include some proprietary software such as WonderBrush and liblayout (used by Beam and BePDF) in our releases. This is also on purpose: we think there is nothing wrong with non-free software, if that's what people prefer distributing their programs like. Who are we to decide which licence people should use to write their software? And why would we not distribute it if they allow us to do so?

Over time, people found that free and open source software was a good thing, as they tried to use old BeOS software, they saw how having the source makes it much easier to debug and fix things, even after the author has moved to other projects. We even had some success at getting the sources for BeOS software back from some people old backups and open sourced. So I'd say our way to handle things is working very well, and making people do open source in the long term. While we will probably never do well enough to be on the official FSF list, we are not in bad terms with them. We disagree on some things, that's it.

Personally, I think the no-compromise decisions of the FSF is not a good thing. IT is for this reason that a lot of projects are using llvm instead of gcc. While gcc is free software (under the GPL), writing a proprietary plug-in for it is disallowed. What is that free software licence that prevents you from doing whatever you want with the code? Isn't that just as restrictive as proprietary software? The goal of the GPL is to create a separate bubble of software, which never mix with existing proprietary things. Bridging the gap between the two are BSD-licensed (or similar) projects, and there will always be some there, because when a company has a choice between a BSD and a GPL project, they will often take the former, even if they plan to contribute to it or release their code as open source.

I would also like to point out that one program I am working one uses a 4MB Zobrist hashing table. That table is delivered as a binary blob. The program to create that blob is open source but by it's nature each different computer will generate a different blob when the program is ran.

Thus to insure all copies will work together, they need to include the same blob to work the same together.

Second, the program requires 3,000 seconds to create the blob on my I7 3.4GHz machine, so unless you want long start-up times you needed the blob.

PS. There is a way to make the program create the same blob every time, but it requires it runs as a single thread instead of the 755 threads it presently uses and the run time climbs to something like 45,000 seconds. Plus the Zobrist table starts showing certain patterns in the generated numbers. Not good.

Haiku's rules are easier to follow.

Hi,

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the no-compromise way of the FSF and the GPL. Both this and what we are trying to do are valid solutions, and I think they are actually helping with making a complete free software ecosystem. With only the GPL, some people would not do free software at all. But without the BSD-like licenses, and all other compromises existing for the GPL (GCC runtime libraries exception, font exceptions, etc) the GPL would be isolated from proprietary projects, and it would be impossible to mix GPL code with anything else. Again, there is nothing wrong with that, and it's actually what the FSF is trying to do: make the GPL ecosystem so great that everyone wants to use it, and make it impossible to mix it with proprietary software so people have to completely switch to it.

Now, the GPL can be a good license, if that's what you want, for a single software project. A compiler like gcc, a kernel like Linux, a C library like glibc, for example. Haiku is a whole operating system, and has several components that are MIT licensed, and as such, are GPL compatible when considered separately (we could do a file-by-file listing if needed). However, we don't want to restrict ourselves to GPL-compatible-only stuff. We are welcoming to proprietary software, wich we think is better than no software at all (and yes, GPL software would still be better). It is not our goal in Haiku to advocate the use of the GPL, or any other license, to other projects. So we went with the MIT license for the code we write, and integrate whatever we think is useful in the system, living with the licenses the authors have set on it.