Haiku's Incredible 25-Year Journey Since "Ok, Let's Start"

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Home<br>Haiku Inc.<br>25 Years of Haiku: From "Ok, Let’s Start" to the Present

TL;DR: On August 18, 2001, the day after Palm’s acquisition of Be Inc. was announced, OpenBeOS was born. In 2004 it became Haiku. Twenty-five years later the project is still alive, one of the few open source operating systems not built on Unix/Linux to reach beta stage. R1/beta6 hasn’t shipped yet: as of this writing it’s in the Test Candidate testing phase, with a release targeted for mid-August.

The Day After the End

In the summer of 2001, Be Inc. sold its assets, including BeOS, to Palm. For anyone who had invested time, enthusiasm, and in some cases money in an operating system built from the ground up for multimedia, the news meant one thing: BeOS was about to stop existing.

The next day, on the freshly created mailing list, came the message that would go down in history under the title "Ok, let’s start". It was written by Marcus Overhagen, who laid out the project’s technical foundations right there: binary compatibility across releases, a compatibility layer to run existing BeOS programs, a compiler-independent binary format, and a modular kernel with drivers loaded at runtime instead of a single monolithic kernel to recompile. It’s the founding act of OpenBeOS, led by Michael Phipps, with a goal as simple to state as it was enormous to achieve: rebuild BeOS from scratch, as free software, without depending on a single company that could shut it down again.

Palm refused to license the original code. The official answer came in mid-January 2002, while Be Inc. was being liquidated and its assets put up for auction: David Nagel, then head of PalmSource, wrote to the BeUnited community that Palm had "discussed at length the possibility" but had made "a firm decision" not to license the technology to third parties, for both technical and business reasons. It wasn’t even the only no: in the months that followed, other proposals, including a subscription model meant to fund the fork’s development, were turned down the same way. Nothing left but reverse engineering: studying how BeOS behaved and rewriting its equivalent line by line.

The first concrete piece of work arrived in 2002, and it was anything but a complete operating system: it was a collection of open source components meant to replace, one at a time, their proprietary counterparts inside an existing BeOS 5 installation. Among the first pieces to land were OpenTracker (the file manager, whose code had already been open-sourced by Be Inc. itself shortly before the shutdown, under a license with two restrictive addenda, and which the project picked up and carried forward) and OpenDeskbar, along with a mail daemon replacement called MDR and a handful of preference panels for keyboard, menu, and mouse.

No standalone boot, no installer of its own: a "stop-gap" update to install on top of an existing BeOS 5 installation, useful for keeping the system alive while the more ambitious project took shape. That more ambitious project, in fact, had already started earlier: just three weeks after "Ok, let’s start," on September 9, 2001, came the first commit importing the source code of the NewOS kernel, written by Travis Geiselbrecht, a former Be Inc. engineer, for the x86, SuperH, and PowerPC architectures: it’s the foundation Haiku still stands on today.

In April 2002, the fifth app_server prototype rendered a window for the first time: the first visible sign that something, under that imported kernel, was really starting to take shape.

From OpenBeOS to Haiku

In July 2003 Michael Phipps founded the non-profit Haiku, Inc. in Rochester, New York, to raise funds in support of development. The detail that trips up anyone reconstructing the timeline from memory alone is that the organization was born with that name already, while the public project was still called OpenBeOS: the choice of "Haiku" therefore predates its official adoption.

The public leap came a year later. Palm sent OpenBeOS a notice for infringing its "BeOS" trademark, forcing a change of identity. The new name, already settled internally within the Inc., was confirmed by a vote among the project leaders and officially announced at WalterCon 2004 in Columbus, Ohio, the project’s first developer conference: the t-shirts with the new name were already printed before the announcement was even finished, confirming just how much the choice had already been settled internally.

The motivation wasn’t random. NetPositive, BeOS’s default browser, was well known among users for a particular quirk: when something went wrong, instead of the usual anonymous error message, it displayed a short haiku-style composition, three lines turning a 404 or a timeout into something almost poetic, a flower slipping away, a page lost in the fog. A near-decorative detail of the original system, yet one that captured BeOS’s spirit...