Guest post by The developers of the open source, Amiga-inspired Syllable operating system have chalked up a new release, releasing version 0.6.7. Rohan Pearce at Techworld caught up with lead developer Kaj de Vos for a chat about what’s new and the team’s future plans. Last year OSAlert posted a longer interview with him about the background of the project, also performed by Pearce.
Aren’t the Amiga comparisons quite misleading? Syllable bears far more API similarity to BeOS, from what I renember. Uses the same Handler Message pattern, as well as servers (services) for many of the main functions (app server, is one that springs to mind.) As I remember it, Kutr Skaun stated that Atheos was originally inspired by AmigaOS, but that it had gone through a dramatic refactor since initial release.
Being inspired by BeOS doesn’t preclude being inspired by Amiga OS. AtheOS started out as an Amiga OS clone but was then refactored to do more, so it was still Amiga inspired.
The lower levels of Syllable/AtheOS are most directly Amiga influenced, particularly the kernel. The higher levels in user space are indeed BeOS inspired, particularly the AppServer and the application programming API. Around those skeletons is a lot more influence from Unix, POSIX, Linux, GNU and other third-party open source.
BeOS itself was highly Amiga inspired. It was designed by people who left Apple because Apple had failed to create an answer to the Amiga. Apple had even hired Carl Sassenrath, the creator of the Amiga OS kernel, to develop a new kernel for them, which would have been quite like the later BeOS and Syllable kernels, but was canceled because it couldn’t be compatible with existing Mac software.
Another way to look at it is that we always wanted Syllable to be a modern Amiga successor. Carl Sassenrath went on to design the REBOL programming language, which was meant as the foundation for a new operating system generation. We are following that development line to its conclusion in the Red language.
BeOS is not really Amiga related – not lie you imply. All of the early engineers were either ex-Apple (Sakoman, Erich Ringewald, Bob Herold) or Mac programmers (Benoit Schillings.) they might have taken queues, but most of the early BeOS was built ground up using previous experience at Apple (the Pink project and Talient) and the Dragon book.
As I said with AtheOS, I read tat Kurt had originally been inspired by te Amiga, but that refactoring had left that pretty far from the view of the average Applications programmer.
REBOL doesn’t interest me.
Just to address this directly – the Amiga “influence” is a dim distant relic. The BeOS influence is the core of the native API, and much of the subsystem design. Yet Amiga gets rolled out on a regular basis. It’s misleading. ReactOS is an OS inspired by NT. GNU/Linux is inspired by UNIX. AROS is an OS inspired by AmigaOS, as was MorphOS. Syllable is an OS kernel that has a giant glob of API and subsystems inspired by BeOS (though Kurt often tried to deny that fact) The rest, the Amiga, is all cosmetic and potentially extremely low level. Describing Syllable as being Amiga inspired over the other strong influences seems very self serving to me.
You’ll have to complain to TechWorld. I didn’t mention Amiga in my interview. It’s their interpretation, and of other people, including people who were there when things happened. Of course, you’re free to disagree.
From memory, Kurt mentioned Amiga is a couple of interviews, but always as a “well, I didn’t copy BeOS – originally I was inspired by Amiga” type of defence to allegations. It seems to have stuck to Syllable. In fact, this thread proves the point
http://ann.lu/comments2.cgi?view=0957529072&category=news&start=1&3…
Have you considered that the author might be right about his own operating system?
Well… are we talking about Kurt Skauen here? If so, yeah, my assertions are true:
Which is a FAQ from the AtheOS pages. And later in that thread:
A direct quote from Kurt Skauen.
If we’re talking about you, Syllable is hardly *your* OS. Syllable is based on Skauen’s work and has a hell of a lot of Vanders in it.
You’re full of ill-willed assumptions. I was talking about Kurt. Nothing you said has disproved that AtheOS was inspired by Amiga OS. This inspiration continues in Syllable. Half of the original Syllable team were Amigans, and we implemented more Amiga inspired features after AtheOS.
Like? (please list these features, I am interested)
Text is an imperfect medium for conversation, and I can only take what you wrote at face value. As you didn’t specifically qualify who the “author” was….
I guess, you should come up with facts.
First you must define what you understand under “amgia inspired”.
Perhaps the initial idea was “amgia inspired” and then turned into “beos/haiku inspired”.
So one fact was already mentionated:
Kurt saying that is has as good as nothing in common (just the decorator) with Amiga.
Then there are the other facts, which show that kurt tried to implement the stuff present in the bebook (beos). (He was just omiting the “B”, but when you look at the bebook and syllable the connection is clear. That’s also how i also learnt something about syllable api, by first reading the bebook, and noticing that syllable api was mostly just a little subset of beos api. Of course after the fork of atheos, some new stuff came to the api that was inspired of the bebook, for example the classes written by rick and others).
And recently also necroromancist tries to “be a little compatible to haiku” at source source level.
Now the beos related connection is shown. Now I guess someone from syllable should come and show more facts related to amiga, and show that the amiga influence is much greater than the beos one.
Otherwise it’s indeed misleading to say “amiga inspired” if there is a much stronger connection to beos/haiku.