Over the past couple of months, I’ve been getting a number of emails asking me about SkyOS’ status. Since I didn’t know anything beyond what’s on the SkyOS website, and because, well, I have no affiliation with SkyOS, I couldn’t really reply to these emails. However, after yet another email sent to me late last week, I decided to simply… Email Robert Szeleney, the man behind the project.
As some of you might remember, after a long silence from the SkyOS camp, I decided to stir things up a bit about a year ago, which resulted in a reply from Szeleney detailing the hurdles the project was facing – a combination of personal matters and technical issues.
“I have to admit that I underestimated the speed at which new technolgy develops and establishes,” Szeleney said a year ago, “And, a while ago I was able to spend more than 6 hours a day developing for SkyOS, for years. Recently, as my first baby was born this of course changed which made the entire developing situation even worth. Again I underestimated a few, personal, real life factors and their impact on developing.”
As a result, Szeleney started experimenting with using either the NetBSD or Linux kernel as a base. He created a proof-of-concept where the SkyOS userland and tools were running atop a Linux kernel. “Only the linux kernel will be used. No textmode. From a user point of view no difference should be visible between the current SkyOS kernel or this proof of concept Linux kernel,” Szeleny explained last summer, “Based on the results of these proof of concepts (e.g. performance, user experience, etc.) further decisions regarding the SkyOS future can be made.”
That’s where things went silent again. No more news items on the SkyOS site, no progress reports, and the forums more or less died out, only awakened every now and then by a confused person posting ideas for SkyOS to use. After having received a number of emails in which people asked me what SkyOS’ status was (why me? I have no idea), I decided to simply ask Szeleney himself. I of course have his permission to reproduce his answers here.
These days, Szeleney also develops iPhone games, which have become quite successful: Rope’n’Fly, RunStickRun, and Amazing Havoc. “Yes, developing a few games from time to time is a rather funny variation of the day-to-day business,” Szeleney wrote in his reply to my email.
Let’s get to the meat of the matter, though. What is SkyOS’ current status? Is it dead, as some have proclaimed in the SkyOS forums? “The current status as posted on skyos.org didn’t change,” Szeleney explains, “The project is still on halt with trying to find alternatives (mostly speaking with possible interested people/companies about continuing the development).”
“SkyOS is not dead, but it is currently not developed actively on,” he continues, “I don’t want to call it dead at all, because once officially declared dead, there will be no motivations/reason for
anyone trying to continue the effort at all.”
“You know, I had the opinion I informed people quite well and explained the situation in detail on skyos.org. Alternatively people can always contact me, talking about this issue in detail too. As soon as new relevant things happen skyos.org will of course be updated to inform people,” he further details, “Let say, SkyOS is in a critical state at this moment, and sound the death knell on it yet would be quite easy, but trying to get it back on track is the real challenge currently, for me or potential new project owners.”
So, there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth (which I always find a rather odd phrase, but alas). If you have more questions, or if you’re interested in maybe helping out in some way, you can always contact Szeleney directly (his contact information can be found here).
Now, let’s hope something can be worked out, because it would be a shame to see all the work gone into SkyOS to be wasted.
Always a good alternative for redemption before death.
SkyOS is known for being in a perpetual state of unfinishedness. Open sourcing it would make it even more so.
Apologies for being a troll, but I do not feel that open sourcing it is necessarily the solution. It^aEURTMs his project and I^aEURTMd rather hear it directly from him where he wants it to go.
Why?
What’s better: An unfinished project being worked on, or just an unfinished project?
I suggest you take a look at OpenSolaris. So much promise when it was originally open sourced only to find there has been bugger all outside contributions from the great unwashed programming masses. Open sourcing something isn’t the panacea to solve all of lifes problems.
Agreed. But opensourced at least stands a chance. That is, if Mr. Szeleney doesn’t find partners to keep it alive.
FreeBSD’s D-trace and ZFS beg to differ…
Furthermore, the whole point of OpenSolaris was to act as a test bed for future technologies destined to end up in future iterations of Solaris, not as a pool to develop their kernel using unpaid anonymous parties.
This is probably one of those times in which you equate your perception of something you know nothing about (in terms of specifics), with reality.
Yes, that is very nice but they’re examples of another project gaining of the technology made available through the open source project but you haven’t actually said anything regarding the fact that there is a lack of external developers outside of Sun.
The purpose of OpenSolaris is more than just a jerk around play fest, it was there to create a community of users and advocates to push OpenSolaris further into enterprise and academic customers in the same way that Linux made their way in to such organisations during the early high growth days of Linux.
There are things that need fixing up; the FAT file system driver within Solaris is a single locked, poorly optimised but functional driver that needs some TLC. This is where the ‘community’ can come together that can address a short coming that is important but not important enough for Sun to address valuable resources to fixing up the short comings. That is one example of where the ‘community’ can step up and fill in a position where the project is lacking. No one is talking about any old random person contributing something but I am talking about more people from outside Sun, be they third parties who work with Sun or even just enthusiasts with a good programming track record contributing back to the project in areas that need attention for users like me but aren’t high enough as far as Sun/Oracles business plan as to allocate resources.
As for my position regarding Solaris over all, I’d love to see Solaris take off – I’d love to see it as being not only a robust competitor to Linux in the enterprise but I’d also love to see it as a competitive alternative to Linux and Windows on the desktop – for those who don’t want the bleeding edge but instead a reliable community supported alternative operating system. To imply that I’m some sort of OpenSolaris hater is as far from the truth as one can get.
OpenSolaris couldn’t take off because it doesn’t have anything to sell.
The niche is all but exhausted.
Linux was the first and it has GNU and the GPL. FreeBSD is reasonably well done, free and can incorporate unfree and weirdly licensed code easily unlike GPL code.
Other BSDs fill even smaller niches. There is just no place for ugly OpenSolaris to fit into.
But it still contributed some code and ideas to other projects. You can’t really call it “dead”.
If SkyOS had something to contribute it would be nice to open source it, but above all the author’s will has to be respected. He wrote it after all. If you want code, write it yourself, don’t demand.
Still, IMO, he was a bit too ambitious when he thought he could do it alone even years ago.
You can do a proof of concept alone, but a real OS that people actually want to use, and even pay for, now and 20 years ago needs a lot of work, and a single man just cannot do it. Even if you are aiming for embedded systems.
OpenSolaris, unlike Linux depends on a very specific corporation. Since it is their product, it has a very different set of goals and target audience than you may feel like projecting onto it. That being said, no one is stopping you from signing up as a developer for OpenSolaris and contribute to your heart’s content.
It just gets really tiring to hear people bitch, just for the sake of bitching… and still think they have contributed something.
What could he add to what he just said? He even mentions “potential new project owners”
I hope he doesn’t make the same mistake as Tal Danzig of Libranet: he was hoping to make a fortune from Libranet code, and he killed the project in the process (not that a real comparison is possible, Libranet was a great OS from every point of view, still missed by its fans).
That is not completely true, however I understand that from the outside that may have been the impression. Tal had been talking to a company, but also to some Libranet users with a development background. The idea was that if we could come up with a good proposal, that Adminmenu and the Libranet installer would become open source. Having a sound plan was important to Tal since, for obvious reasons, the code was very dear to him.
We made a proposal for ‘OpenLibranet’, and while we were in agreement technically, we could not agree on a full plan. The thing was that he wanted us to make a first version (OpenLibranet 3.1), and if that turned out to be acceptable, Libranet would go opensource.
Being a former Libranet employee, I knew how much time and energy goes into building a full release. Since OpenLibranet would be volunteer work, the team backing it would have to work long nights for at least half a year to make a release. That was too much of an investment if in the end the whole deal can fail.
We then agreed to let it rest. But both sides did their best to free Libranet.
Now Libranet is nothing but a very good memory, and no current Debian-distribution comes even close to providing something as user-friendly and extensive as Adminmenu or the Libranet installer. I still cherish my Libranet 3.0 CD set, but unfortunately I lost (removed) my last checkout of our internal Subversion development tree. Would be fun to see how much still builds
.
Edited 2010-03-02 16:51 UTC
Hi Daniel
I am an old Libranet user (S.1704).
And yet I didn’t know what you just told me, thanks
I couldn’t agree more that “no current Debian-distribution comes even close to providing something as user-friendly and extensive as Adminmenu or the Libranet installer”
It is really a shame that the community felt that too much work was involved. Unfortunately I am not a dev, but I could have helped in some other way, i.e. translating/promoting the distro (I am very good at that).
I also cherish my Libranet 3.0 CDs and DVD, but unfortunately it does not support my hardware: 1 desktop and 1 laptop, both (almost) bleeding edge.
OTOH I am not very keen on running an OS in a virtual environment.
That’s just wrong. Just because a software is open sourced it doesn’t make it bad. Bad development does. Or no development like in this case.
Then what’s your solution? Because I see none. This project is dead regardless what Szeleney says. And nothing will bring it back to life IMO not even open sourcing it. He’s sitting on the code for far too long. According to http://www.skyos.org/board/viewtopic.php?p=99308#p99308 this forum post<a/> he’s sitting on it for 4 years. One would think that it’s pretty obvious by now that nobody wants to buy it.
Actually open sourcing would be at least a graceful death. At least let other projects use what they can from SkyOS code if he dosn’t do anything with it.
Redemption? Bullshit.
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2009/02/07/msg007841.htm…
Good point, I have always like the principles that drive BSD development but hated what it takes to set it up.
Apple made it easy to use, but wants an arm, a leg and whatever is left in your wallet.
SkyOS on top of BSD would remove his problems with drivers and give him a very stable kernel.
I hope he choses a plan soon, in another year or two he may be too far behind to catch up.
Choose…? Plan…? WILL be behind…?
Don’t bet on that one – he’s too busy baby-sitting and writing software for the iPhone…
Hmmm, writing software for the iPhone? But I thought he didn’t have time any longer to write software but yet he writes iPhone apps? What the … ????!!!!!
I’m sure, all those having forked over money for the “beta” program have learned their lessons…
Maniac out.
Indeed, that would be a fun experiment. Incoorporate it as a part of a BSD project (NetBSD is a good choice
). Focus on a tiny selection of hardware, and make it exceptionally stable, user-friendly, and well-tuned. Something a BSD project could achieve in its cathedral-style projects.
No Open Source = Death. Fast and bad. SkyOS is an interesting concept still.
I don’t know what his best solution today should be, but I am sure of what he should have done 4-5 years ago.
And that is to let registered users have access to most if not all of the code. The license could have required that any changes they made had to stay inside the project, and thus he would roll in the code from those other users when it was up to his standards.
As it is he has been doing *ALL* the key work for years, when there has always been some free labour to handle many of the needed code cases.
Most FOSS has 50%+ of the work done by just a few key coders, but the rest is done by the mass of users out there. He just had to control what of those extras get rolled into the official OS.
This does not mean he had to give up control of the OS, just that he could have farmed out some of the development to those who already were committed to the OS since they paid money just to get into the program. I am sure if he had done so that a lot more drivers and support programs would have been written by now.
I am basing that view on what I am seeing with the development of Haiku. The coding standard already is predefined. The APIs are mostly already defined. The key commit developers spend a lot of time discussing what code will be a part of the official OS. And that is basicly what they spend their time debugging and supporting.
Heck, maybe he should use Haiku’s kernel? I think the MIT licence would allow that.
Open sourcing does not necessarily imply loss of control on the direction of the project. After-all, aren’t there many contributors to the Linux kernel yet requiring blessing by Linus himself before being incorporated into the main source tree? On the other hand, the various Linux distributions (from a common kernel) are focused on a few aspects which tie together the main contributors to a given distribution? Mint and MythTV are examples which comes to mind for multimedia delivery.
Maybe there could be some synergies with the Haiku project – after-all, isn’t the SkyOS File System a derivative of the BeOS File System?
This may come 5 years later than it should have. Nevertheless, still better late than never or before complete bit erasure.
But it’s lying there with a horrific gut wound, slowly bleeding out. In the os world, death of a reputation is often the death of a project, and SkyOS is almost dead if it isn’t already.
It’s quite unfortunate but I think this quote sums it up:
“Let say, SkyOS is in a critical state at this moment, and sound the death knell on it yet would be quite easy, but trying to get it back on track is the real challenge currently”
And it seems his attention has already wandered over to iPhone development, which can be very interesting.
It does not seem like there is much effort into getting it back on track. So thank for the update, but there is no change in the status here.
If any SkyOS people want to try out development on a very unique OS, I invite you to start here:
http://www.osnews.com/story/22903/Writing_Applications_for_Haiku
It’s a great way to spend time until something happens with SkyOS.
Indeed.
If he doesn’t have the motivation to keep the project alive, then he should at least delegate it rather than stringing people along with “it’s not dead! it’s not dead! Honest” while coding for other projects.
While I think the whole open source argument is a little unfair (it’s his project and FOSS isn’t the answer for every development), at the very least he should be looking for partners.
It’s almost as if he’s just holding out for a corporate buyer. But I can’t see there being any money there. If a free and more complete system like Linux is struggling, then what hope is there for an obscure OS like SkyOS?
Plus the OS market moves pretty rapidly so 6 months of stagnation can be lethal – let alone the 18 months of closed doors we’ve had.
I very nearly paid in to SkyOS about 6 months before it’s death *ahem* hold (house move kept my finances tied up at the time). Part of me is gutted as it looked great – but most of me is chuffing glad I hadn’t otherwise I’d have felt somewhat ripped off.
While I think the whole open source argument is a little unfair (it’s his project and FOSS isn’t the answer for every development), at the very least he should be looking for partners.
Well, it may be unfair, but with the current state of the project it isn’t an outlandish argument. SkyOS is undead. The creator doesn’t want to go on working on it, but the creator also refuses to let go. In it’s current state it is just another comatose project without any real life relevance. Either set it free or let it die.
Claiming with a straight face there is still life in something that hasn’t taken one breath in over a year is delusional.
Hense my point.
There are other options outside of death and open source
Yep, sell it to a Corporation. Did BeOS a lot of good
Did you actually read my original post before replying?
It’s just you seem to have missed every point I’ve made.
It’s not really fair to fault him for writing iPhone apps right now. SkyOS is what everyone wants, but they won’t pay his bills in the meantime. We can’t expect the guy to go into debt until he figures stuff out.
While his financial accounts are none of my business, he clearly states his iPhone business is in addition to his day job and I’d be surprised if anyone chooses to raise a family based on the projected earnings of an unstable income.
But fair enough the extra income is always welcome when starting a family.
It was his pet vapor-ware project and now he finds iphone development more interesting.
Open sourcing the code would just reveal how much GPL and BSD code he actually took.
And you have proof supporting this statement?
You kill and eat babies. I’m sure of it. I can’t prove it, but I just know.
You’re naive if you think he created a posix compatible monokernel and an original tcp/ip stack without borrowing a significant amount of GPL and BSD code.
He’s a very talented developer but also a liar.
Ask him to open source just the kernel and tcp/ip stack for academic reasons. Let’s see what lousy excuse he comes up with.
Proof, sonny. You can’t make claims like this without proof.
No one has access to the code so nothing can be proven. However his claims are highly suspicious given how many man-hours it takes to build a tcp/ip stack and kernel from scratch and how oddly similar his design choices are to Unix-like systems. It would be one thing if he had been working on a system like Haiku that can not easily take from FreeBSD/Linux systems but a posix compatible monokernel?
So anyways how much money did you send him Thom?
Funny how he has been suspected of GPL violations in the past yet never wanted to clear his name by open sourcing the project. What kind of IP would he be giving away here? It isn’t as if there is a shortage of Unix-like monokernels.
Why not just open it so we can see his pre-emptive multitasking kernel? It would be interesting to see the kernel design decisions he made in comparison to the teams that have worked on the BSD and Linux kernels.
I’m going to build a Quake 3 like engine this weekend that just happens to work with Quake 3 mods. I’ll be charging $15 for the beta so go ahead and send me your money.
So, oh great sensei, how many kernels have you written? Where do you get all this experience from? Who made you the authority in this area? All I know is that SkyOS is a project started in the late ’90s, and considering how incredibly useless, broken, and totally lacking in hardware support it has been, it is not at all impossible for him to having written this by himself – especially considering he works for a company that coded extensively with vXworks, giving him substantial access to information about hardware covered under NDAs.
More baseless accusations, but I’ll bite: none. I got my beta access as a gift ages ago, because before I joined OSAlert, I helped in translation and some other aspects.
He works for a company that has access to information under NDAs – which is likely what makes it hard for him to just open source it. This is information you do not have because you have never been involved with the project. Which is fine – but it only serves to illustrate how uninformed you are.
I’m not uniformed, but I do have a better sense of software development than you which is why I was calling BULLSHIT on this project from the start while you and others were blindly following as if it was perfectly normal to add extremely complex features in short time frames that just so happen to be in other monokernel systems.
Charging for a beta should have been a red flag for even people who have no concept of how long it takes to write a tcp/ip stack from scratch. You don’t PAY FOR A BETA, you’re already doing the developer a favor by testing it for free. That should have spelled S-C-A-M.
Now you’re making NDA excuses for him. That’s great.
How dare we question someone who charges for a beta and then ditches the project in favor of iphone development. Why do you have such a soft spot for him? Maybe you’re afraid of him opening the code since it might show that that me and a lot of people on Slashdot have been right all along when it comes to him stealing code. After all those of us who called it vaporware are already 1 for 2.
Exactly, you might as well stop there, because pretty much everything else you keep spouting is nothing but bullshit and speculation. You’re clearly an ass, you can stop proving it to us now.
If SkyOS was based on Linux or BSD, it would be lightyears ahead of where it is. I can’t even get it to boot on a multitude of systems that run BSD and Linux just fine, thanks.
Oh right I’m the ass, not Robert who I warned people about years ago.
Try reading more carefully next time. I never said it was based on FreeBSD or Linux. He most likely lifted code from things like the scheduler and networking stack. A direct fork would be too obvious.
Funny I was also called names years ago when I told people to not support SkyOS because there were too many red flags.
Note that I never said anything remotely similar about Haiku or ReactOS. Haiku especially has a good team and I wish them the best. SkyOS however has always reeked of BS from the beginning and I’m sorry if you didn’t smell anything.
Linux isn’t fully POSIX compatible. Only partially – much like Haiku.
So I’m really not sure what the point your trying to make here – aside trying to devalue the hard work of a fellow developer based on nothing more than prejudice.
Partially? Try mostly.
I don’t buy his claims. He doesn’t exactly have shining credibility at this point. Do you realize that the paid beta testers were promised a final version?
The reason that we decided to require a small fee is basically to cover costs and also to provide some extra funding to our project. The $30 fee is actually the same price as retail price of the SkyOS 5.0 Final release. So you can either pay $30 when SkyOS 5.0 Final is released, or you can pay it now, receive a beta copy of 5.0 to test, have access to the beta forums to get your questions answered personally, and then also have SkyOS 5.0 Final shipped to you when it is ready. You really are not paying anything extra, but you are receiving much more.
http://www.techimo.com/articles/index.pl?photo=154
I called it vapor-ware, I was right, now I’m the prick for not believing that all his code was original? I’m not the one who took $30 from people with a promise of a final version.
Edited 2010-03-03 04:48 UTC
Mostly is still only partially so my point stands.
You can’t use one unrelated fact to prove another.
While you have a point about the fee (a point I’d already made in this topic), it has nothing to do with the source code that may or may not have been stolen.
at the moment you’re still trying to justify your own prejudice.
So what if you were right about the vaporware – I think it was obvious to most people that SkyOS was never going to get far beyond beta. But then few hobbyist OSs do.
While using GPL without releasing at least that part of the source code would indeed violate the terms of the GPL, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using BSD and not releasing the source code. With this in mind he easily could have used one of the *BSD’s network code, and he would have had no obligations to then release his source code.
This is in fact what was done with Haiku-os implementation of the Be file system. SkyOS took the implementation and used it. This is acceptable under the terms of the BSD license.
I also agree with Thom that you cannot prove he used GPL (which I hope you are convinced is the only thing that would be a problem) without seeing his source code. So please be considerate of the amount of work that someone put into this operating system.
I wouldn’t care if he used BSD code if he was honest about it. That’s the whole issue. I don’t believe that his kernel and tcp/ip stack are original as claimed. I consider him to be a very shady person and I bet he used GPL code as well.
Once a programmer looks into HAIKU why should he switch back to SkyOS?
No way!
@Robert: Sorry mate you lost a lot more than just a few SkyOS users; SkyOS as a OS platform is gone – history.
Have fun with what you enjoy now… writing iPhone apps.
Actually I contacted him as well last week and got a more or less similar answer.
Just posted this- http://www.skyos.org/board/viewtopic.php?p=99308#p99308
When Robert gets called out publicly like this is when he’s most likely to be persuaded into taking action, so anybody from the old days, maybe back me up there if you agree.
While the first words are “Sky is not dead”, what the complete mail means is much more simple:
Sky OS is dead.
The OS father do not want to call it so, but it is.
This is software. Nothing is buried. It can always be worked on again. But it is very unlikely and has no development whatsoever for years: by all means, it is just dead.
Sky OS did not deliver a real useable desktop, but it did not promise either, and was a great project (i bought the beta, years ago!)
Sorry for off topic.
From horse racing and betting: getting the highest opinion on a horse or race conditions in order to make a winning bet involved seeking out the highest authority…. none higher than the horse itself, hence the expression.
This isnt really accurate. Classically, a horse’s age and health were determined by looking in it’s mouth at its teeth. So to get the most accurate story about a horse’s condition you would simply open its mouth, there fore you get it straight from the horses mouth. I grew up on a Horse ranch and we bred horses.
There was too much work being done for one person.
I remember his little followers telling me that Robert wasn’t taking BSD networking code either. I was told he built the TCP/IP stack from scratch which gave me quite a good laugh. He forked the file system but not the networking stack. Right….
Charging for a beta should have been a red flag.
Because it’s impossible for one person to develop an OS and write their own networking stack? please, stop being so damn ignorant.
Take a look at the OSDev community, there are a handful of projects that do indeed support networking.
It does beg the question, and I see nothing wrong with bringing this up.
Sorry to sound so negative but I always thought this project was a joke, and when the news hit last year I was not surprised in the least. In fact I predicted as much. And I predict now that one year away you will still see absolutely no movement. I won’t go any further than to say that this whole project was suspicious to say the least from the first day I heard of it. Suspicious is actually the kind word in replacement of other adjectives I would much prefer to use.
You’re the one who is ignorant.
The Linux kernel was recently pegged at over a billion in value due to the amount of work that has gone into it.
Yet I am supposed to believe that Robert made his own posix compatible monokernel and tcp/ip stack in a few years without taking GPL or BSD code.
But he did fork the file system, and so we are supposed to just take his word that he didn’t take code from anywhere else?
You were probably one of the people that paid for the beta. I called this vapor-ware from the start and Robert’s little followers called me ignorant then among other things.
Open-sourcing SkyOS would show how similar the kernel is to Linux and FreeBSD and I would expect directly copied GPL code as well.
Individuals can build hobby operating systems but SkyOS was developed too quickly and had too many features for one person to build from scratch.
Now after charging people to run a beta (hilarious) he doesn’t want to open source the project and is now interested in iphone development. That sounds like a person of character who would never steal code.
You don’t know Robert.
There are standard libraries/application in SkyOS that are GPL but he posted any changes made to those projects on the site or submitted them as a patch.
Also, I have had multiple occasions where porting an application was not easy due to missing functions that other operating systems have in their standard C library. It would be so easy to copy those functions from GPL code but he refused to do that because of the licensing.
For most of those functions, there is a good description of what they do. For a good programmer, that is enough information to write the method yourself.
I even have seen some parts of the code and never noticed anything that looked like a GPL violation.
Also, there are other licenses that do not prevent undisclosed use of the code.
I have seen how fast Robert was able to rewrite GUI parts from scratch with a better architecture. In fact he even started rewriting the kernel to get rid of some old design flaws. He didn’t continue that because there were more important things to get done (at that time)
If you worked with Robert directly, you know that he is capable of producing code at an incredible speed without needing GPL code. Claiming that GPL code was responsible for the fast pace SkyOS was progressing with just shows that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I don’t doubt that he is a talented developer. I’ve already acknowledged that. However I also think he is a talented liar.
When I told people not to pay for the beta I was told then by his little followers that he could be trusted and was a coding genius. So looking back my judgement of the project was much more accurate than the people working with him. I accurately predicted that the final would never come and Robert would not refund any of the money.
Now he is going to let the project die and switch to iphone development. He has no plans to open source it either. What a great guy.
Who are you to judge the pace at which a person can develop an operating system? from what I’ve read it took him several years.
I do not use SkyOS, nor have I paid for anything.. but I have no reason to doubt that the author has written the operating system himself.
Again, I urge you to do a little research.. I know of several hobby kernels that do indeed support networking and include their own GUI.
Even if he did indeed utilize BSD licenced code for his project, it was well within the licence for him to do so.
Stop trolling, and take a look around.. osdev.org has a list of projects, with varying degree of completeness.
Edited 2010-03-03 03:32 UTC
osdev is a bunch of clowns reinventing linux, poorly.
“clowns”? Please respect to ourselves.
What do you do with your spare time? do you watch TV, browse the web, play PS3 games, have sex, drink beer or read books?
Can I call you clown too because the ridiculous things you do in your spare time? I do not think so.
Obviously you do not write code because if you would do it, you would respect such OS hobbyist developers.
I wrote a 64-bit operating system, LoseThos, http://www.losethos.com with a 64-bit compiler. Those clowns at OsDev didn’t want to hear my advice and banned me. They’re farting around with 32-bit, and really arrogant. They indoctrinate people with bad advice. You don’t know what your talking about. This stupid site banned me too!
LoseThos can malloc an 8 Gig chunk on a 12 gig machine. Try that with Linux or Windows. It’s not a joke immitation of Linux.
Edited 2010-03-03 23:08 UTC
So, sorry about my aggressive reply to your first comment; though it also sounded aggressive, you know much more about the matter than me and you have some real experiences to actual hate them.
Well, I guess it’s alive and kickin’… not only that, it comes with full diapers and an iPhone, which literally screams to write apps for, right?
I probably have a better idea than y’all on questions of one person doing an operating system. I wrote LoseThos with no GPL code. Schedulers, by the way, can be really trivial.
I did my own compiler. If he did a network stack, that’s about equivalent. Are we talking a browser, as well? That begins to get dubious.
It wasn’t just the networking stack.
There were red flags when he would quickly add features that…..what do you know, other posix monokernels had. These features were often claimed to written from scratch, like the USB stack:
http://www.osnews.com/story/15812/SkyOS_Gets_USB_Support
For a lot of those features it doesn’t even make sense to write them from scratch when you can use BSD code. But I suspected then as I do now that he wanted as much glory as possible so he used BSD code and lied about it being from scratch.
But check out this comment from Darkness in that thread who just recently posted that I don’t know Robert:
There is a lot of crappy software out there where you have to pay more than 30$ to get a full version.
30$ is really no big deal, spend a good night out in a club and you could loose even more.
You are obviously not someone who would even be willing to donate to some project just because you like it or you want to support the developper(s).
and yes, he is the only one doing core developper. The payed beta program is one reason for him not to loose interest in it.
I don’t think he has time to be back on track with the SkyOS development. I hope Robert writes a book about his personal experience with SkyOS. He is a respected programmer with many ideas and thinking; seems that he has his own set of programming philosophy and approaches.
Wish you a good effort on your life, good sir.
I think that nothing can help SkyOS now. The community is gone so there is no one left for an open source SkyOS. The alternative to sell the os is a dead end too, who would buy an incomplete, unstable os with a bad hardware support?
So I think it is dead and only Robert or someone really interested in os development can bring it back and both parties haven’t done anything until now.
I don’t think it was a bad os but it was clear that it would die one day.
In Another words nothing has happened cause no company had contact him to buy it.
If he really want to do something about SkyOS, he should release what he got as BSD or GPL and then forget about it.
Its clear to me that he does not want to see his effort banish in the web without receiving any kind of retribution.
Robert forget about another Kernel combination, people like SkyOS cause was different so open it as it and live your life.
Thank you anyway
I wonder what his OS is actually worth in real dollars. It would of course be great to see it open sourced. Who has the cash to buy it?
I’m starting to feel there is a dearth of actual OS news on OSAlert.
Good to see some news on this, I think its great to have more diversity and that this project will continue.
… it just smells funny.
But apart from that he doesn’t want to declare it “officially” dead, there is nothing in this article providing any evedence that it isn’t…
Anyway, relying on proprietary software that depends on a single person is not a good idea. Thanks for making that clear once more.