BeOS Clone Haiku Releases R1 Alpha 4 117
New submitter kallisti5 writes "The Haiku project released their 4th alpha release today. A year and four months have passed since the 3rd alpha release. Haiku R1A4 includes several enhancements such as a large number of bug fixes, early IPv6 support, better drivers, improved file system support, better localization, and a wide variety of new features and applications."
Multimedia enhancements include support for modern Intel and Radeon HD cards.
Re:Hoping for a light GPL-free desktop (Score:4, Informative)
If you're trying to develop a commercial product, best make sure it has no GPL code in it.
I think you mean: If you're trying to develop a commercial product by stealing others' code and claiming it's your own, best make sure it has no GPL code in it.
GPL code has no legal problems that aren't much larger if you base your work on someone else's proprietary code. GPL merely legalizes your "stealing", but says you must then permit others to "steal" your code as well. With proprietary code, anything you do with it is illegal.
Not that this matters much to the users, who mostly don't ever write any code, much less attempt to sell it.
(There's a long tradition in technical circles of taking insults and turning them into technical jargon. And there's the old saying that copying from one person is plagiarism, but copying from many is research. ;-)
Re:Haiku will be Linux for the desktop (Score:2, Informative)
The reason for the outdated interface is that Haiku R1 is going to be strictly an attempt to clone BeOS. That was always the stated goal of the project. R2 on the other hand, will be the version where the Haiku team really focuses on building upon what they have to create something better. That being said, the internals of Haiku are already fairly robust and capable, and have advanced well beyond the capabilities of BeOS. I think that once R1 is complete and the internals are solid and stable, the road to 2.0 will be a much shorter one.