OSNews and the day it died

Back in the day, I spent most nights building operating systems for fun, and a fair amount of time helping other OS hobbyist. In fact, once I got good "osdev-ing", helping others was the real kick.

The old mega tokyo (now osdever) forum was the primary place to hang out, along with the insanely troll-infested #osdev channel over at Freenode.

But the place to look for news, in-depth interviews and interesting articles was OSNews.com. The reason it was a great site, despite its narrow focus, was good editors. Some of the interviews are in my view an important part of computer history. Some of the obscure operating systems discussed actually became useful and are still under development (Haiku, Syllable, amiga os variants, etc.) Others are just obscure, but open sourced and thus useful for others. Some of the interview objects have gone to other interesting ventures.

Unfortunately, at some point a new editor came along. Thom Holwerda. With his dutch arrogance and not-so-great insight into operating systems, he slowly began to tear down the original concept and basically started a personal blog with the occasional guest contribution. He has been quite frank about it too, through comments ("I don't care what our readers think") and pretty clueless posts explaining how the site is no longer about alternative operating systems.

In fact, the only contributions he have made in that area is whining about SkyOS's slow development, and "explaining" how non-mainstream OS's are irrelevant. Let's just face it. OSNews is now just another generic technology blog (with high volume on uninteresting comments, and low volume on actual original articles.)

The point of this post? If anyone wants to start up a new "alternative OS" site, there's at least one avid reader awaiting the announcement. Alternatively, Thom will go bark up some other wrong tree.