I’m a huge Blender3d fan, a couple years back NaN (the company building the program) went out of business. The user community along with the head developer descided to buy the code. They put a counter on the homepage and within months they purchased and owned the code and now Blender is Open Source and huge. I was wondering if this is something folks see as possible? I’m sure it would help speed up the development. What do you guys think, is this possible?
You know, I was thinking the same thing the other day actually but then I realized that it would take way too much money. It’s a shame that Access is just letting the source waste away but I guess that doesn’t matter to them.
Regardless Haiku is well on it’s way so we can do without 
No, not going to happen!
Palm bought BeOS for $11 Million back in 2001.
Only way to get BeOS would be to make a really good offer ( in the Millions? ). Only a really rich corporation or person could buy it. No way to get Haiku users to raise that kind of money.
Blender3d sold for a lot less, $147,000.
Yes, it’s taking some time to get Haiku to Release 1.0. Could be another 2-5 years before the official 1.0 release. Best way to speed it up is to get more developers interested and contributing code. Also helpful is users giving donations so that developers have funds to attend presentations and events, etc.
It’s not just the money, though. There are other reasons that BeOS couldn’t be open-sourced like Blender was, with licensed code being the main thing. Not all of the code used in BeOS was developed in-house. IIRC, there was some internal color management which was licensed from Kodak, for example. Net+ had some stuff that couldn’t be open-sourced, either.
There was a time when I would have said that it would’ve been of great benefit for R5 to be opened up, but Haiku has come a long, long way since I thought that way. There have been so many improvements that I doubt that there’d be much that we would use, anyway. Our app_server, while still not perfect, doesn’t have the cruft that R5’s does. The kernel wouldn’t do us much good unless it was the BONE-ified version, and even then, it wouldn’t get us much. Our POSIX stuff is, while not compliant, is much closer than R5 or Zeta ever was. The only places that I could see where it would help if it were possible would be the recording part of our Media Kit, bugfixing the client-side of the Interface Kit, and maybe something like QuickRes.
It definitely wouldn’t be worth the millions of dollars that the community would need to pay. It might be worth a hundred thousand or so ;).
Like Darkwyrm said we wouldn’t get that much out of it. If Haiku would have had the source early in the game it would have gotten us to where we are now quicker but now that we are this far (and have made many improvements) it’s not really with it IMHO.
Thanks for the responses. If I wanted to download a livecd where would I do that at?
Through a mystical time portal to the future…
Booting off a CD did work once, and may even still do so, but preparing the CD is far from trivial and as far as I know there is not a regularly updated CD image anywhere. What we do have are nightly builds that you can try out in VMWare or copy to a spare hard drive partition. See http://www.haiku-os.org/downloads for those.
Live CD support is one of the things that will be worked on for the R1 Alpha release which is just beginning to be seriously thought about.
Simon
Good to know, I look forward to it.
I tried the nightly build but it gave me an error on three different image versions in VMWare Workstation 5. Any thoughts?
[quote=mikedoth]Good to know, I look forward to it.
I tried the nightly build but it gave me an error on three different image versions in VMWare Workstation 5. Any thoughts?[/quote]
What does the error say? First guesses - make sure you’re using a VMware image and not one of the raw hard disk ones. Also you can try hitting space bar early on in the boot and enabling some of the safe mode options. Should work in VMware without any of those though, I think.
There is also the Haikuware Weekly Superpack on Haikuware.com. You might need a newer version of VMware to get that to work tho. Also, Karl just made a VirtualBox version of the superpack so you might want to give that a try. You can get both at Haikuware.