Hello, all.
Earlier this year, I had asked if a 'fork' of Haiku is possible. After reading in Guidelines, and I quote, "The Haiku project believes that having one distribution (the one officially released by the project) is the best long term strategy to ensure success of the platform..." I do not believe that making a fork should ever be done if Haiku is to stay alive.
However, recently, I had read a few interesting posts that caught my attention that I believe should be addressed seriously as open source programmers, including "How to use programs for Windows with Haiku?" and "The chicken and egg problem of BeOS."
Is Haiku ready to face the world of real-time OSes? It is honestly well-built, but as both posts pointed out, what can it run? It is estimated that Microsoft(r) Windows(r) holds "90% of the market share" (Wikipedia).
Therefore, I put forth on the table a few questions about Haiku in response to reading the posts. Should we want it to run Windows applications or "programs"? Should Haiku adapt to the Windows(r) user? What will the normal end user want? Will Haiku be able to surpass the MS foothold? As one user pointed out, end users "have taken the blue pill"--that is, are MS brainwashed. MS is *not* helping the situation for programmers either--again I quote: "programmers program with Microsoft." Adding to this, recently MS launched an ad campaign against openOffice.org!
Is our best bet for OSS survival Wine and Linux? I hope not, and I hope that open source can stay alive and grow. I believe these are serious questions every coder or user with any open source platform, should be asking right now.