Guest post by Syllable OS lead developer Kaj de Vos has been interviewed by Techworld Australia. The full Q&A is also available (via Slashdot).
Syllable OS lead developer Kaj de Vos has been interviewed by Techworld Australia. The full Q&A is also available (via Slashdot).
What a nice reading!
I’ll give it a try tonight
One Goal of Syllable is to keep this minimum hardware requirements? I mean, this is somehow sympathic, but honestly, on the to become a big player, there need to some essential things, that raise the requirements.
But not as high as Qubes OS… thats to high^^
Well, i like Syllable and i hope it will go its ways.
I don’t know where you read that our goal is to freeze our hardware requirements, but can you give me an example of an essential feature that would boost the requirements?
There is no one essential feature. Each user has different requirements.
But all those requirements need little features served by all sorts of daemons.
And of course huge features like compositing.
The more features, the higher the requirements.
Just cause you believe it does not make it so.
Forgive me. I don’t have enough background knowledge on the development of Syllable. The latest stable release of Syllable was released on May 15, 2009.
What were the Syllable developers doing for the past 2 years?
Remember, Syllable is an OS implemented by guys that make it in their spare time…. so… I think these 2 years they simply were working for a living; like you or me.
If you read our front page news articles and change logs for the past two years and the articles here on OSAlert, you will know.
That interview was nice to read.
Kaj and the syllable team does great work.
Your fortitude is inspirational and shows what can be done.
My 20cents here to the Syllable team.
Regarding future applications.
Please consider only getting one or two highly functional programs per application type.
More people working say on just one audio application for example can polish it more and add more depth to it.
Well, for sure there have been some trouble in the upper layers of the Syllable organization.
This is a comment (from an (ex-)insider at Syallable) on a thread at haiku-os.org: https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/syllable_vs_haiku#comment-1…
This explains why there has been little progress on the actual OS itself. Of course there will be two sides on the story, but where there is smoke…..
But of course I wish Syllable all the best since I am a fan of alternative operating systems.
But me, me like Haiku
(Aplha3 is another great leap)
Since i know all the internals (since i spent a lot of time with syllable) I can tell you what happend with the developers.
They run away, and let kaj alone, who is not a c/c++ developer. His abilities are scripting, and that’s i guess the reason why he insists on rebol/red and other scripting languages. Nearly all developers are gone, and the if there are some left (which are not officially gone), then they are inactive. On syllable project there are very rarely people doing anything related to development. You can watch their source code activity, it’s nearly constantly zero, since the most developers left. Also the leader of syllable (vanders), was declared by kaj as not being the leader anymore. The potential of syllable is really zero. Even FreeDos is making a lot more progress and has more potential for the future than syllable. And the reason why most of the developers left, is not because suddenly they didnt have any free-time, no, it was exclusively because of kaj, who started to insist on his ideas (even he is not a c/c++ developer). What is the result? Kaj has still his philosophical ideas, but without having done much in the last years. He hopes, that 3’rd party stuff will work on syllable without too much work needed. Anyway in any case, the GUI bindings need to be done by syllable, and nobody is there to do that job. Even Haiku, which doenst put scripting as a priority has now scripting languages on haiku with gui bindings. Syllable does not, even the ideas of kaj to incorporate rebol in syllable are dated back to the year 2007 (or perhaps 2008). After nearly 4-5 years the results are nearly zero.
I don’t recall every committing any significant patches from you, cipri.
Excuse me?
True on my end… Kaj can be a real PITA to deal with. He believes he is right all the time and I had to get away from that situation. Sorry, Vanders… that is the truth!
Hi Rick! Oh I’m not arguing that what cipri said was untrue in all cases, but I’m getting quiet bored of cipri claiming to be an authority on all things Syllable.
As a reader of OSAlert and as someone who a long time ago made some minor contributions to Syllable, I’d like to second this sentiment.
Cipri, it has over the last few years become very clear you don’t think much of the current state and direction of Syllable. We all got the message. But really, the relentless hate-on you seem to have for Kaj is getting increasingly childish, and tiresome to read.
You’ve come to the conclusion Syllable isn’t for you anymore long ago, and seem to focus most of your active participation on other projects. Perhaps it’s high time to also move on emotionally, and leave your feud with (some of) the Syllable people behind.
I have no idea why people take my words as words of hate?
Yes, it’s already a long time ago,so there is not even a little part of hate in me. I could even go with kaj to the pub to drink a cup of …. calm water :-).
Why don’t you try to take my words as “pure information”?
It can happen that I make sometimes errors when I’m tired (and I also admit them), but in “as good as all” cases i say stuff that is really true.
Now I was starting posting here, when I saw someone bringing praise to the great development done by kaj and his “team”.
I really wonder how someone can praise kaj, when in fact the development of syllable is nearly constantly zero in the last years.
Why not take a look first at the source-code that changed in the last years and then say your opinion. Even if you are blind you can see that the syllable development in the last years is nearly 0, so how can you get the idea to start praising kaj?
I really wonder how kaj say “thanks” when somebody is praising him for the great development he did, when in fact kaj knows that he did as good as nothing related to real OS development.
I would really feel ashamed, how he can even say proudly “thanks”, i really dont understand.
I have the impression that Kaj (and partially also Vanders) refused to see the reality.
One of that realities was that the majority of the syllable developers didnt like the syllable server (based on linux) which kaj brought inside syllable more or less through the backdoor.
There are more reason why the majority of the syllable developers left (officially and inofficially) or are now very silent. And one of the reason was also the existence of “syllable server”. It’s not the only reason, just one of more, but it is one too.
I guess Kaj will now feel offended, but I really recommand him to contact all syllable developers and all ex-syllable-delevopers and ask them about their honest feelings/sentiments/opinion related to the syllable server, and ask them, how much they love it.
Of course he will not do that, perhaps he is afraid of the truth, and prefers to lie himself.
So, that was just a side-note, that is off-topic.
Now let us do something on-topic, and praise Kaj for bringing Syllable to new heights :-))
Thank you Kaj, for bringing Syllable under your leadership to new heights, that haven’t been reached before.
Now that I think that syllable is the successor of atheos, and that can be interpreted as kaj being the successor of Kurt Skauen.
What an evolution at the scale of the leadership of the OS.
Who’s next? Mikey Mouse?
( sorry for that joke, but I really like to make jokes )
Syllable is not a hate-based project – at least, not any more. We have no place for people who hate Linux, not for people who hate REBOL, not even for people who hate Haiku. And for better or for worse, we have no place for people who hate me.
Kaj,
No-one hates you! We just think you are a horrible leader with delusions of grandeur. We old developers were in it to have fun and we weren’t going to have a benevolent dictator tell us what to do. ‘Nuff said.
Rick Caudill
EX-Syllable developer.
Well, fate has a way of dealing with the world. One of your ideas of having fun was to pester me out of the project, and it backfired on you people.
We did not pester you. None of us agreed with you and you thought you were God… You wouldn’t even listen to other people’s ideas… It was your way or the wrong way and that became too much for myself at least. It is okay though because you are the reason Syllable fell under. So I sleep fine at night
Now if you will excuse me I have the day off and am doing productive things with my time.
I have hard proof of your willful pestering, but that is irrelevant. Syllable was a community project under a leader that we all respected. But instead of following his lead, which I was helping to execute, you decided to sabotage the project, in favour of your own position and your so-called Syllable fork. The result is that your fork never saw the light of day, and that I am now leading a delayed Syllable project, because noone else is qualified. This is what you get for sabotaging a community project.
I don’t think the irony is lost on you, and that’s why you are now all coming out of the woodwork when I do a simple interview.
Yes dear Kaj, that was the problem at that time that you “helped to execute the leadership of vanders”. You behaved like the leader. You as a non c/c++ developer you started to take decisions. Please try to remember what was your position at one time, it was like that (or similar): “If it’s not like I want, then I leave”.
[q]you decided to sabotage the project[\q]
How did Rick sabotage the project? Did he delete the code you wrote? Did he hold you back from developing Syllable? Since years you are “leading” syllable alone. You took the dicision and everything. So you have to take on you the periode of stagnation.
Why don’t you buy a c++ book and learn up-to-date c++ and start writing code for syllable?
Dear Kaj, I guess, I know what hurts you, and that’s the fact, that now nobody writes code (at least not much), which you can commit, and now you can not anymore give the false impression that you would be developing something. Just because you commited the work of others you started to feel great, and you started to tell the other developers, that you have the biggest merits, and so you can take the dicissions.
It was the mistake of Vanders, that he didnt put you back at the place where you belong, but at that time he was weak (I guess I remember he said he some personal problems at that time). So in some proportion Vanders is also guilty for what happened, because he let you do anything you wanted.
Now you are the greatest of greatest syllable developers (since as good as all left).
I cant await to see the major improvements in the next release. What will it be? New icons? new fonts? More 3rd party packages installed?
You still hope that others will do the development work for you, and that you can just give the orders in what direction the OS to go.
In conclusion: please stop blaming for the stagnation of syllable. You have been leading the last years, so it’s your responsability.
I’m very curious how many years you still need to bring a new syllable relase. Two have already passed.
For all your claims that you know everything, you know very little. You weren’t even in the communication system of the core group.
For example, you would be surprised what Rick really thinks of you.
Yes, I didnt want to enter your personal AltMe world, but that doesnt mean, that I havent read parts of your AltMe logs. As I told you long time ago you have/had infiltrants, even you try to hold everything secret. The next time you allow somebody to enter you AltMe world you should first ask for the finger-prints, and check everything.
And yes, I have and had weaknesses, and it’s not a problem to me, if somebody points them out, or if somebody has a certain opinion about me.
In comparision to other, I use the take information as information, and not as “accusation”.
I have a great respect for rick, because he is great programmer. The same respect I also have for Dee, Vanders, Jonas, Anthony, arno and also Jonas and so on.
And I also admirate your scripting abilities, but you did it really wrong. If you wouldn’t have had such a dominant position, today, I guess syllable wouldn’t have been concentrated on scripting and also the syllable server would have suffered, but instead you would have had today a lot more active developers. Some went officially, the others, did it inofficially, and didnt tell you, and let you believe that they are still on your side.
Edited 2011-09-02 22:44 UTC
Why? It’s an open system, in which everybody has always been invited. I know about the “infiltrants”. It’s not particularly hard to infiltrate an open system, is it now?
Really? I guess I dont need to remember you, that it’s not the easiest think in the world to get into your AltMe world.
And the logs you dont publish, even you said repetately that you would do it in the future, it still didnt happen. I understand something else under open.
Whoa… leave me out of your squabbles. You truly can be a child! Rick, yes I am talking in 3rd person here, thinks more of Cipri than he does you. Also, Rick, seems to remember how you like to blame others for your mistakes. Remember I made your girlfriend break up with you. Now leave enough alone… go back to your delusions and I will go back to my wife and children.
Well, when I see your name above a comment I immediately associate it with long, rant-ish and repetitive posts, where you often concentrate on one person’s failings. I realise that’s a generalisation, but it *is* the first thing that comes up. And to be frank, most names here come up completely blank for me.
Let’s take a step back, and look at the comments from your profile. Most of them are for Syllable-related articles, and fairly negative. Also the negativeness revolves around marginalising new developments of Syllable (even if they are small), belittling Kaj’s abilities, or even cornering Vanders here on the forum and demand explanations.
That really sounds to me like someone who still has a bone to pick.
To be honest, you haven’t convinced me. But I hope I am wrong. And anyway, my personal opinion in that doesn’t matter much anyway.
Reading back those previous comments of yours in Syllable-related threads, I sense a lot of bitterness and resentment in them. I’m not saying there are no true facts or valid opinions at all in your comments, but your comments are certainly heavily coloured by your negative experience with the community. So I don’t feel I can take your comments on this subject as “pure information”.
That’s only human, but then my suggestion is to reconsider the possibility that Syllable still makes you more on edge than you’d like, and to reflect a little longer on your Syllable-related posts. I regularly leave forum posts alone for an hour after writing them, only submitting (or scrapping!) them after another re-read.
There are plenty of reasons why it can be difficult to interpret the nuances and true intentions of posts on the Internet, that also goes for yours *and* mine. I hope I haven’t offended you with this one; my main motive here was to give you some insight into why *I* “take [your] words as words of hate”.
I kind of lost all interest in Syllable after Kaj introduced REBOL. It really didn’t seem like a good fit. It seemed more like “Amiga” rather than the perception I had of AtheOS reborn. And, at the time Vanders and Kaj were hard to discuss anything regarding the validity of REBOL in Syllable with. Mention XML – “XML is useless, we can do this with REBOL” – why? Why reinvent the wheel? “REBOL is more efficient!” – okay… so everyone else in IT is completely insane then? XML is pretty much industry standard. What about .Net as a simplified development platform? “We can use REBOL for that!” Okay, but why use a minority language, when there is a wealth of usable code.. sigh.
This sounds like a rant and I don’t really have any more to add, save I agree with the perceptions that where highlighted in the “Syllable vs Haiku” thread someone quoted the link for above. It was about the time REBOL came about, and Syllable Server, and the Syllable “band camps” that is all went wrong for me and I bailed on the project.
Without getting into the rest of your comment, the answer is yes. Yes they are. XML is a terrible, complicated mess. It was in the right place at the right time (thank you, SOAP…) but that doesn’t make it the best solution for everything.
Yeah, but its a popular solution for many things. Having the ability to interact with popular interchange languages like XML is a necessary evil. Like speaking in English.
+1 – absolutely spot on.
XML isn’t a terribly complicated mess at all. XML is actually a really simple mark up definition language. What is terribly complicated is the way in which some developers believe it is the answer for all problems. Having worked on a product that uses it for some horribly bastardised scripting language (nothing but XML, no other script) – THAT is a horribly overly complicated mess. XML in general is actually simple.
Modding yourself up, eh?
JSON and YAML are both much more simple than XML for simple data exchange, and yes, XML alone may be simple enough (although still more complex than JSON) but once you start bolting on all the related standards and schemas you’re into a sticky quagmire.
Quite. There are very few cases where the features of XML are really required. Simple data exchange is not one of them.
Uhm, if you want to standardize fully on “Industry standard”, use Windows and .NET..
Those who works on alternate OS are not satisfied with current “industry standards” so this is a poor argument.
Well no – the CIL and CLR are an industry standard – that is not what Microsoft supplies per se. You can use the CLR without the full Microsoft platform. But that is another discussion.
Ah, cool. So they don’t need to write any C or C++ in their OS then – because they are industry Standards… and so is Assembler… hmmm..
Boolean algebra would beg to differ.
Anyway, you’re welcome to port .Net to Syllable. In fact, I ported part of GNU Portable .Net in the very early years of Syllable. But we found something better.
Well, there are some OSs which are written in languages other than C or C++, don’t you know?
Don’t blame REBOL as a language for eventually wrong decision of Syllable team members!
well no, you blame the developers for using something unsuitable, obviously. The IT industry is littered with cool ideas that didn’t cut the mustard….
Can you port Chrome Browser to say Haiku and Syllable.
If you could that a whole range of applications would be at the users disposable.
How challenging is this?
Who should port it? On syllable there are no active developers. Perhaps you can find one or two that consider themself developers after they managed to compile a comand line application by running the “make” command.
There are even not developers that solve the most simple bugs, that would need just a few lines of code.
Syllable 0.6.6 is already more than 2 years old, and their last development build is also about 2 years old. Compare it with Haiku that has every day a few development builds.
Those people, whom you are referring, have never been involved in your story with Syllable, Kaj or anything else, keep them apart your bitterness. Thank you in advance.
Webster (the Syllable web browser) is built around Webkit, but the port is incomplete in several places and it’s out of date now in any case.
I like the comparisions of Kaj. Translated to a nontechnical analogy, they use to be like that:
Somebody says to kaj’s two years old child: kaj, look at vandam, he has so many muscles, and he is so fast compared to your two years old child.
And kaj answeres:
“Yes, but does vandam fit in a toy-car like my son? If you weight vandame, how many kg’s does he have? 70? 80? My child has only 10kg!! “
these forums is ruthless
70,80 kg for a child? That’s not something to be proud of. 10 kg is a bit on the emancipated anorexic side as well. Something more like 22 kg sounds better to me for a generic child of generic child age.
you didnt get the idea. Light doesnt mean automatically it’s great. Vandam is heavy, but instead full of muscles, which you can use to do work. The child has 10 kg, but mostly fat.
Syllable misses really a lot of things. It’s light, but it also doesnt offer much. It has a “leight” api, but which instead is very very uncomplete and very buggy.
Even if you do something simple you come across it’s liminations and bugs, and if you try to do something more complex the bugs become more and more obvious.
The syllable community has come to the conglusion that it even has no sense to report bugs, because even the most trivial ones are not solved, even they have been repetedly reported over the years.
It’s really in such a funny situation, that you could think that it’s bug-free if you look how often bug reports are done. It seems like nobody has anything to complain about. But in fact most people dont care anymore, and so bugs are not reported. Or just very rarely by newbies which are new and dont know yet, that the project is know alredy for some years mroe or less in a pause-periode. Most of the devs / ex-devs are expecting it to die, a new version 0.6.7 is not expected by them to come out anytime soon.
No, you didn’t get what I was saying. 10 kg on a child is not enough weight. No one would brag that their 8 year old was 10 kg.He would be considered malnourished, or anorexic. You chose bad numbers for your analogy. Its like my physics books that had problems where the solution was that a swimmer had an average speed of 60 kph in a swimming pool. That could never happen and gets in the way of the lesson that is trying to be taught.
Maybe Syllable has a very skinny API?
Ok, this is becoming a lot more pedantic than I thought. I understand Syllable is lightweight. Syllable developers and users think this is a good thing. If you were trying to help people understand that something that some people think is a good thing may not be a good thing, you would have to compare it to a more easily understood scenario where something may look good if only viewed with a narrow perspective, but actually looks bad upon further inspection. My complaint about the numbers used, is that in the analogy syllable’s counterpart never looks good when viewed from any single aspect. A 10 kg child is not something anyone would brag about. Just change Syllable’s kid’s mass to 22 kg and the other os kids mass to 44 kg and the analogy works a lot better.
Small pet peeve of mine: when people do analogies backwards such that it works better in reverse. as in
The colors black is actually a darker color to most people than white in much the same was as Helium becomes a Bose-Einstein condensate under lower pressure for most temperatures than Hydrogen.
10 kg for a 2 year old is OK.
Guess it depends on your definition of child. A two year old is a toddler ’round here parts. If that was the target age, then the 70,80 kg child is even more off the mark.
I think you’ve been misunderstanding the original post. It talked about a comparison people would make between Kaj’s 2 year old child and a grown-up.
(I thought he was referring to Jean-Claude Van Damme, even though he weighs way more than 80kg..!)
Oh… I see. My brain obviously wasn’t reading that right. He also says two year old. Missed that too. Jean Claude VanDamn would make more sense.
Still a bad analogy. Jean Claude is quite possible the worst actor in history, he should never be referred to as a positive in a an analogy. He makes Keanu look like Brando.
Should know better than be doing Haiku vs. Syllable or vice versa. It’s bad enough when there’s Linux vs. BSD arguments, with both groups having similar goals, just being on different paths. Now people are going to do it with with these two OSes too?
I guess I qualify as a former Syllable developer. I submitted one patch to help get boot-from-CD working. I was also on the team hat helped choose Syllable’s logo.
To me it’s sad to see the current state of the project. Syllable seems to have stagnated. It does remind me of what happened to it’s parent.
But I don’t blame any one person. Syllable was (and is) a unique OS that made it fun to use but less attractive to outside developers because it wasn’t Linux/Unixy enough.
But I still check the Syllable website. And when a new release comes, I’ll try it, just as I have every release since Syllable could boot from a CD.
Hang in there. It won’t always be like this.
This is an honest bowl of soup, so everyone should take a sip of it.
Ciprian, it’s truly time to let it go. There are many of us who know the true situation with Syllable & the fact of the matter is that what’s really eating you happened years ago, literally. It’s now 2011. It’s time to let it go, man. We all know your stance, you state the same thing each time. You’re very happy with Haiku. Well, that’s great, the best of luck to you with Haiku. Things could turn around for Syllable at any time. But, if you keep bringing up old stuff, then how do you expect Syllable to ever get past that old hump & get better? Have you ever stopped to think that you could be scaring new developers away? Ok, so Kaj is Syllable’s lead developer now…big deal. The reality of the situation is that he’s the big cheese, so he makes the decisions. All in all, it really doesn’t matter how he became the project lead or whether or not he does the actual coding. All that’s really required is for him to lead the development…give the project direction & keep the project headed in that direction. It’s not easy running a project, regardless of size. And, arguably, OS development is very difficult to manage & govern over. Many people have opinions about various things & no one likes it when things don’t go their way. But the fact of the matter is that when you’re in charge, you’re in charge –period, point blank. Now, you want answers from Vanders…well, if he doesn’t want to tell you what you want to hear, then there comes a point where it’s time to get over it & move on. Projects come & go, developers come & go, users come & go, and OSes come & go. That’s just how it is. But don’t sit here & unnecessarily poison the well. Just because things didn’t work out with you & Syllable, doesn’t mean that things won’t work out for the next person & Syllable. And if all else fails & you’re just so attached to Syllable still, well, the source is open…you could always fork. In any case, you’ve said your piece, there’s no need to beat a dead horse.
I agree with Dee… Cipri, you are a great guy but it is time to move on. The rest of us have. The past is the past. Good luck to Syllable in its endeavors. I hope Kaj finds people that will listen to his “wisdom and expertise” and all is well. Time heals all wounds Cipri
Assuming you get some more help with this project, what kinds of things did you have in mind for the future of Syllable?
The interview is about that. Anything specific you want to know?
How about this. If you could look ahead to 1.0 release notes for Syllable, what might they look like?
That’s pretty much exactly what the interviewer asked, so I’ll refer you there.
So, you have a project consisting of about three people and a dead cow, and you fight like this? In public? On OSAlert?
Okidoky.
Thom:
We had a project consisting of about 3 developers and now there is one. All this happened a long time ago.
Some things are worth fighting for, even if you can’t win. If I fight for Syllable I’m being blamed, and if I don’t fight for Syllable I’m being blamed, so I might as well do what I feel like doing myself.
Well now we know what happened. Conflicts between developers.
Syllable seems to have some code submit activity in the source tree. although from what I can tell, no functional changes to the kernel or apserver for at least 14 months. This and the Developers and former developers openly arguing on OSAlert sure gives it a bad smell.
The interview explains why this is not the highest priority for the project.
Interesting comments. They say even bad publicity is better than no publicity but in this case we were probably better off with no publicity….
Yes, that strategy of kaj, to make publicity and hope developers will come who he can command and tell them what to do.
Just look how many “conferences” kaj made/gave in the last years. Every year he makes summer/winter/whatever conferences.
For that things he has time (and money), but for learning c++ and doing some real developement for syllable he doesnt have time.
Yes, there are also other companies that have that strategy to make a lot of publicity to their bad products and hoping people will buy it.
It seems Kaj tries something similar.
You still didnt notice that doesnt work? In general real developers are not stupid, and you can not fool them with empty (philosophical) words/ideeas.
Syllable is in such a situation that even FreeDos has a more bright future. (Freedos is doing active development, and they have more developers)
So, if you want to have succes , you will need to concentrate on real and “own” (and not 3’rd party) development.
The past (few years) have shown that it’s a dead end if you concentrate on publicity instead, and hoping that a very skilled developer (and naive enough, not to see the low potential syllable has) will appear and you will be able to command him, and to implement kaj ideeas.
Edited 2011-09-05 12:09 UTC