[ge-talk] Possible Future Development Branch?

[Ian Nowland]

Hi All,

One of the recent ideas that has occurred to me is that BeOS is, and Haiku
is shaping up to be, an incredible single user OS. In particular, its
fantastic at handling media, and maintains a small footprint on system
resources.

Now, there is one large device domain that is single user where those
features are prized above all others: handheld devices. In addition,
handheld devices are increasing drastically in popularity and importance in
people's every day computational needs. As I'm sure has already occurred to
most of you at some point, a version of Haiku able to operate on mobile
devices would be fantastic.

The idea that occurred to me recently is an extension of this idea: Until
very recently, every phone and device had such a custom hardware that trying
to port Haiku to any one device, while nice, wouldn't be too useful.
However, that has changed, very recently, with Google's announcement of
Android.

If we could develop two compatibility layers for Haiku, we would have an
incredible device OS that had both hardware and software makers creating for
it. The two layers needed would be a software compatibility layer capable of
running the Android compatible Java applications - which doesn't sound too
bad, as it's just a version of Java, and a hardware compatibility layer
capable of letting Haiku run on Android specced hardware. While the hardware
layer would probably be more difficult, it seems feasible to design it in
such a way that driver extensions to the hardware spec that device providers
write would let Haiku use the new hardware device as well.

What does everyone think of this idea?

--Ian
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