T-DOSE (III): Conclusion

A few hours ago I had my Haiku talk on the Dutch Open Source event T-DOSE, and I’m still glowing all over. The attendence was above all my expectations, around 25 people were in the room. And despite of the last minute all night changes I had to make, the speech went fluently. Someone made a few pictures, which I hope to be able to post soon, and more importantly, I’m on tv! I’m on Sunday around 11 AM, so have a look!

I’d sincerely like to thank the T-DOSE organisers, Jeroen Baten and Jean-Paul Saman, for making this event possible. Read on for more!

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The presentation was divided up into two parts. My initial presentation was designed for a far less techie-audience, and it was solely based around the concept of the Haiku Brand. I argued that Haiku is an extremely tempting operating system because of a combination of factors. There’s the product, which is the actual code and the binaries resulting from that. I argued that many of the unique selling points of BeOS had been reimplemented in other Operating Systems, and often in a better way. That lead me to the philosophy. Keep it simple, keep it flexible, and stay focused. Based around that philosophy there is a small, dedicated community that is keeping those ideals alive.

That combination of the product, the philosophy and the community, leads to the Haiku Brand. A brand appeals to people, just like Nike does, or MacDonald’s.

The second part of my talk was the part I drafted up this night, and it was about some of the technical aspects of the product (for my geek audience). After a general introduction on the different layers, I focused on three things I found important. First of all, the messaging architecture, which enables the multi-threaded nature of the Operating System. Secondly, I outlined the OpenBFS file system, and the magical things that attributes are. Finally, I briefly touched on add-ons and replicants. All in all, I’d like to thank François Revol and Michael Phipps/Axel Dörfler for the pointers they have in the slides of theNUMERICA and the Haik Tech Talk presentations. They provided a good base.

It wasn’t all perfect though. The notebook on which I performed my trick had a vmware image of Haiku. And at home, naturally, everything except Vision worked flawlessly. Naturally I avoided Vision, but Haiku managed to freeze twice on me. Oh, and by the way, it did not freeze at all during a private demonstration afterwards.

Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed my talk, and in general I think the audience did as well, and I hope you will too if you manage to look at the video.