Interview with Joseph Cheek of Lycoris

Glykoriza writes "Lots of talk lately about the future of Linux in the desktop. Red Hat wants to have a piece of the pie, while Lindows seems to do well too. Lycoris seems to do great as well, they released their latest beta a few days ago, and they have already made deals with retailers, like Fry's. OSNews hosts an interview with Lycoris' CTO and founder, Joseph Cheek."

What the interview didn't bring up...

[captain_scarecrow]

is that Mr. Cheek announced in the Lycoris forum sometime back that Lycoris, following the lead of Caldera, is going to per-seat licensing for business use- thus joining the ranks of those selling Linux outright.

That's really too bad, it had a lot of promise for that niche.

Re:History repeats itself

[Veteran]

Did Geos kick Window's ass? Oh yes, Geos was written in 8086 assembler - it was much tighter and faster than Windows, and a total embarrassment to Microsoft. Even had Geos released the API it would have been out of reach of most developers - professional or otherwise; most programmers can't write applications in assembly. Because of the 640 K non protected mode limit on OS and applications, the programs would have needed to be either very elementary or written in assembly to fit. (It would have been possible to do something with LIM memory to have paged non running programs out to additional memory the way Lotus paged out sections of 123.)

At the time Geos was started it was a good idea; there were many 808X computers in use that did not have protected mode available so there was a much bigger market for a Geos type system than for something which used protected mode. By the time it hit the market the situation had changed: many people had 286's or better with protected mode capabilities.

Windows existed as a non protected mode version before 3.0 but it was a useless flop. It wasn't until a (286) protected mode version of Windows was made that it became successful.

Remember that a protected mode operating system from Microsoft had existed for a considerable period of time: OS/2. The main reason that OS/2 didn't win is that its DOS computability was very poor, and that few people had written apps for the GUI; so the perception of the public was that you couldn't do much with it. Microsoft created the perception in the minds of the public that Windows had better DOS computability and that there were more programs for Windows.

Inside of Microsoft everybody knew the reality: which was that OS/2 was far superior to Windows as an operating system - after all Microsoft had written most of OS/2. With Windows, Microsoft saw a chance to cut IBM off at the knees; which they did. Had people's perceptions come closer to reality Windows would have been dismissed as a poor joke and OS/2 would have won the day.

Microsoft knows from experience (reinforced with W95 vs OS/2 Warp) that inferior products can win in the market place as long as the public doesn't know that they are inferior. Microsoft knows that no matter how good any variant of Linux actually is as long as people perceive that Windows is better that they are home free. For example Red Hat is easier to install than Windows - but most people don't know that because they don't install Windows.

When your perceptions match reality it is difficult to see the world from the perspective of the vast majority of humanity - who live in the reality distortion field which caused by a lack of understanding.

The Linux community is faced with a fundamental problem: the difficulty of raising the educational level of the masses to a sufficient level that they can understand the reality of Linux vs Microsoft; as Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated a plausible lie is a much easier sell than an implausible truth.

Re:History repeats itself

[Art Tatum]

This creates a wonderful opportunity. Instead of aiming for 'end users', Linux desktops should aim at amateur developers who want a free and simple workbench for writing the kinds of applications that made Windows 3.1 rule the world.

You are talking about GNUstep [gnustep.org]. For many years, the OpenStep API and development tools have been far superior to *anything* else in the Windows or UNIX world. The GNUstep project has already got usable alpha clones of the NeXT development tools [gnustep.org] that are a joy to work with. Take a look at this mail client [collaboration-world.com] developed quickly with GNUstep tools. It runs on GNUstep platforms and Mac OS X.

The GNUstep project is actively tracking the additions made to Cocoa [apple.com] (what Apple decided to call OpenStep after buying NeXT).

GNUstep frameworks and applications will build on most UNIXes, on Mac OS X (obviously), and win32 platforms. Support for the GUI backend is Alpha on win32 but is progressing.

GNUstep has a database framework much like NeXT's Enterprise Object Framework and a web development system [gnustepweb.org] much like WebObjects [apple.com]. Also available is a 3D framework [3dkit.org], music and sound frameworks [musickit.org], a networking framework [tripod.com], an email framework [collaboration-world.com], and others [omnigroup.com].

Like Apple, you can write your applications in Objective C or Java [gnustep.it]. Unlike Apple, the GNUstep project provides several other language options: Ruby [gnustep.org], Guile, and other scripting languages by way of StepTalk [steptalk.host.sk].