What do you guys think happened to PearOS. Some say 'apple' took it but I highly doubt that. So who would acquire it? Why do you think they acquired it? What use could you do with it.
To me it's just another fork of ubuntu. What would be the commerical decisions to acquire the OS if indeed it is a commerical acquisition?
Since it is FOSS (free, open source) it is doubtful any one acquired it. According to DistroWatch, it has been discontinued. It was a French fork of Ubuntu. My guess is that there was just not enough community behind it to keep it going.
I remember reading an article somewhere online in the last couple of weeks discussing this very issue.
Pear OS was a one man effort, so it is possible that David Tavares simply decided to end the project. However that is unlikely because before the Pear OS website was taken down (the site is now offline) - David announced that the project was closing because it had been bought from him by a well-known tech company who wanted to remain anonymous for now and who want to develop and improve Pear OS for their products. I don't like to think that David would have lied about that. So it is almost certain that somebody has bought Pear OS.
But without knowing who bought Pear OS and their exact plans for it, we can do little more than speculate.
I too doubt that Apple would have bought it. They have no real need for it. And if Apple wanted it shut down, they have lawyers for that.. Unless it was cheaper to buy Pear out than to sue... Which is possible - but again, extremely unlikely! Personally, I don't think that Pear OS would even have been on Apples radar.
From the vague information that was given by David before the Pear website disappeared, perhaps a harware/OEM type company has bought it and plans to ship their new hardware with PearOS pre-installed. This is a very distinct and feasible possibility. There may be a sincere OEM out there who wants a modern-looking, FLOSS OS to ship with their products. And Pear OS would certainly fit that description. And if this is the case, the mystery buyers would have almost certainly bought Pear in order to take control of its development to suit their agenda. Perhaps they plan to do with Pears fork of Ubuntu, what Canonical did with their fork of Debian (aka Ubuntu).
Whatever they do; being covered by the GPL, the source code for Pear OS would have to remain available to the users when (or if) Pear OS resurfaces.
But again, this is pure speculation! The only people who know exactly what is going on is David Tavares and his mystery benefactors/buyers!
Yeah that's what I was thinking... I doubt he would lie about something like that. I guess if a company with a serious hardware product or whatever it is would see the value of starting with an OS much like PearOS rather that start afresh.
Although without bashing it too much essentially it is just a ubuntu derivative skinned to look like macosX with a few other features of course.
That's why I was asking what commercial appeal it would have... Out of curiousity more than anything else.
We shall see...
Well, since he can't sell anything that is GPL-based (like most of what was brought in from Ubuntu in making the derivative). My guess is that either:
1) Apple has threatened him with a big law suite because he "copied" the Mac OSX features. And now, he is trying to save face by saying that he made a deal with "some big company".
2) He added a nice feature to PearOS that Apple was interested in applying to Mac OSX. As long as that new feature is entirely his creation (no code from others), then he is free to withdraw its FOSS distribution within PearOS, and instead license it to Apple, which would mean a big pay-out for him.
I hope it's the latter.
^^It would have to be one hell of a killer feature. One that the large swathe of mac developers that get paid shed loads to think up and explore have missed. -sounds doubtful but who knows.
Isn't mac a totally different OS anyhoo? I mean I know underneath it is all unix but it how a feature may work in pearos will require recoding for macox right?
Of course, it will require recoding it for Mac. But the copyright (or likely future patents) on the feature is not about the code itself, it's about the feature (how it looks, how it works for the user, etc..). There has been a raging war of software patents lately, especially by the big players like Microsoft and Apple to try and prevent people from reproducing their features in other (possibly FOSS) software (see smartphone patent war, which probably explains the unexpected switch to Windows Phone by some manufacturers (are they looking to avoid lawsuits from Microsoft? I think so..)). I think that this patent war is terrible.
Just because something is covered by the GPL does not mean it cannot be bought or sold. RMS himself even states this!
Free software does not have to be free of cost, but users must have the freedom to be able modify the code. That said, other than RHEL I don't know of any free software which isn't also free of cost! Heh heh! XD
I've seen plenty of free software projects that charge for technical support (e.g. Canonical) and/or training courses (Offensive security, the Blender foundation, the Linux foundation).
When I say bought Pear, I mean they've effectively bought David out so they can dictate the future direction of Pear and its development.
If (IF) a company has bought Pear, perhaps they have taken the old pear site down, moved all of the sources across to their own servers. They'll almost certainly have a team of developers of their own to continue development in whatever direction they choose to take it. At some point, they might resurface and try to build a community around their enhanced version of Pear. Either way, when/if it does resurface, whoever has taken over the development of it will have to release the sources for it as stipulated by the GPL.
If it has been bought by an OEM, they will undoubtedly be re-releasing Pear as a free OS for whatever hardware they plan to ship it with. I don't think there is any question of them attempting to sell it!
The "Apple buying Pear out to acquire a killer new feature" idea is an interesting and unique one Mike! Not one I've heard anywhere else. I'm not sure that Pear really did that much with their fork of Ubuntu though, other than to apply a bit of an Apple style look/feel to Gnome.
And as for software patents, well... They just suck! There's no other way of putting it!
Patents and patent law was never really intended to be applied to software. As far as I understand it, traditionally they were only applicable to some kind of physical, industrial process. TBH, I think software patents were dreamed up by some lawyer or judge somewhere, heh heh! Probably a Texan, because it seems rather a lot of software patents get granted there. There's a whole industry of lawyers and judges being supported by these stupid patents and all of the companies fighting over them. The documentary 'Patent Absurdity' is quite an interesting look at the insanity of software patents! I especially liked the analogy they make about what would have happened to music if classical composers had managed to patent their musical ideas in a similar way to software patents and managed to prevent subsequent composers from being able to use those patented ideas in their music.
It would be better for everybody if all software patents were just declared null and void and all pending legal cases dismissed! Well... Apart from all of the judges and patent lawyers.... And of course the patent trolls and those software companies who want to stop everybody else from doing something painfully obvious...They'd all be a little worse off! But other than that, the rest of society would benefit as a whole because technological development would be able to continue unhindered and would allow healthy competition, rather than monopolies on ideas!
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