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I think I read somewhere that they will base future releases on MIT licensed Haiku sources. When Haiku is ready for prime time, that is.

The MIT license will (naturally/probably) lead to closed future Zetas too, but if things go as Haiku folks plan, Zeta will only be one Haiku distro among others.

Nice plan, hope it works out.

The old OpenBeOS project is now called Haiku: http://haiku-os.org/learn.php

Personally, I'd rather wait for them to succeed, or if they don't learn from the ideas and move on. I don't see the point in another commercial BeOS effort when the first one, with an admittedly GOOD product, crashed and burned. OS lockin has gotten stronger, not weaker - WinXP is stable enough for quite a large number of people. (I.e. that's not their major complaint any more.) I know it's rife with virus and spyware issues, but those problems are as much a function of user habits as anything - as demonstrated by the success of a mechanism (email viri) which requires the active help of the user to run.

Still, there's always Haiku.

Haiku-os is another Be derivative. "The goal of Haiku R1 is to be source- and binary-compatible with BeOS R5."

Now, will Haiku and Zeta be compatible in any way?

http://www.haiku-os.org/

First check BeOS!
http://web.archive.org/web/20010521150816/www.bene ws.com/beos/
to learn the root of the OS.

BeOS was originally developed for BeBOX(custom ppc based smp box) and later started supporting 60x lines of PPC based Apple's Macintosh computers and power computing(Taiwan's mac licensed manufactural).
With version 3.0 x86 versions started shipping.
There were 3.0, 4.0, 4.5 then 5.0 Personal Edition and 5.0 Professional Edition.

I personally believe that BeOS doomed itself with expensive public relations fund spend heavily on BeOS Preview release 2(Remember those BeOS preview release shipped with Mac related magazines for free?) and decision to start selling x86 version. They started offering free version for 5.0 called 5.0 Personal edition, which were bit late(developers have migrated to linux world then...). So company were bought out by Palm.

However, right before they were bought out by Palm, there were two main project which disappeared all together.

BeIA with SONY eVilla project and Dano(BeOS 5.5 release). BeIA pretty much slipped away when Be had office equipment auction when they closed down the building along with some handheld devices(tablet computers loaded with BeIA).

I've heard rumors that after Sony seeing the utter failure of QNX based iOpner(which was immediately followed by another QNX based 3com'saudrey), axed eVilla and destroyed all produced units, so only surviving units are the ones that were auctioned off with BE office closing in CA(developer's machine?).

After BE was sold to Palm...however, BE source along with Dano was leaked over Beshare(beos centric p2p software).

So Dano(considered as unofficial release ver 5.1d0) .

OpenBeOS movement started around this time.
Now OpenBeOS has changed its name to Haiku-OS.
http://www.haiku-os.org/.

And soon people started BeOS Developer's Edition
at http://www.beosonline.com/.

And other people started BeOS http://freshmeat.net/projects/beos-max/
http://www.beos-max.org/.

Both BeOS Developer's Edition and BeOS Max revolves around Be's latest official release BeOS Personal Edition 5.0 + 5.0.3 upates and many new improvement which were contributed by a user community developed opensource softwares & drivers.

However, there versions which includes some unofficial released stuffs(stuffs from Dano and some controversial stuffs)
http://phosphuros.tk/
You can read the article by OSnews here.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6948

Here are some screen shots provided by Korean BeOS UserGroup.
http://www.bekrage.net/gallery/view_album.php?set_ albumName=screen
BeOS is nice because Localization stuffs were incorporated into GUI nicer than most other OS, making easier to support different language than English, especially where language isn't based on phonetic latin based alphabet languages such as Korean/Chinese/Japanese. Thier alphabet is 8bit(or even 16bit) character based.

Currently, Haiku-OS programmers are plugging away diligently where OS is almost ready, where most of the bread and butter applications were already worked out! This is a nicer situation where applications are already there when OS still hasn't shipped, due to special current circumstances of BeOS.

ZetaOS is heavily based on BeOS R5.0.3 + Bone network(Dano style) + lots of improvement borrowed from drivers found on BeBits(opensource community of BeOS) + Haiku-OS(OpenBeOS).

ZetaOS, there are RC1, RC2, RC3, Zeta Neo(considered as RC4) a

You're thinking of Haiku, formerly known as OpenBeOS. I was a member of the project for all of two weeks, until I realized I had nothing to contribute and I should let people do real work. I had dreams of glory and whatnot.

But YellowTAB are using components from Haiku, notably the SVG support in Tracker (quite possibly the entire OpenTracker). They can do that because most open source BeOS software is BSD licensed.

Hopefully by 2015 there will be 'other' alternatives to windows.

Maybe the billion linux os' can get together and make everything seamless by then.

If not there will be Haiku OS.

Palm does. And they didn't seem that keen on selling them. Microsoft could always buy Palm to get BeOS. As a convenient side effect they'd also end up with about 90% of the PDA OS market. And at about that point the government might start asking questions about antitrust.

Microsoft doing much of anything with the remains of BeOS is highly unlikely. Maybe they could buy out the Haiku people, but that doesn't seem like much of a possibility either. Tjose people want to recreat and extend BeOS because they love it. I don't think they'd be keen to let Microsoft turn their efforts into some bastard stepchild of BeOS.

Jedidiah.

Some folks are recreating BeOS as open source. It's called the Haiku project

The status page has more details on the overall system progress. When I first visited that page, I though that it would take forever to finish. I looked again just now and got a most optimistic feeling.

Er, do you happen to know about the open source effort (formerly called OpenBeOS, now called Haiku) to recreate BeOS?

I think it's quite likely that there'll be at least an alpha version of the OS out this year.

No additional security features in the first release, though, the goal was to use R5 as a fixed reference point to avoid arguments about the design of the OS until it was fully functional.

Well, there's always Haiku. Plus, if it's time ever does come, it's open source. :)

while i generally agree with you, here is a special case:

the haiku os (formerly OpenBeOS) kernel is partially written in C++, especially the BFS filesystem implementation. but there's a catch! they don't use many of the features of c++ that make it bad for just these kinds of things. no exceptions, no virtual functions, no STL, none of that other nonesense that c++ does behind your back.

Hey, what about these operations?!

OK, so what if, say, BeOS was ported to x86? And updated? And was later going to be available as open source software? Any interest?

The Haiku project recently turned 3 years old. Several websites have covered the nice letter Michael Phipps wrote to the community.

Happy birthday Linux, naturally... Without all of the hard work in regular Open Source projects, I doubt there would have been half as much motivation for our small projects, in another timeline. (You know, the evil timeline where Billy G is president of the US of A. :)

Cheers!

Until then i'll still keep my midnight candlelight vigil until BeOS comes back.

Like totally you totally need like an Amiga, man! Dude, holy crap, the Amiga with OS/2 Warp was like the greatest system ever and you could install it on like a NeXT and it was like so cool because like... uhhh... ummm... JUST TRUST ME, IT WAS THE GREATEST OS EVER!

Except of course for JoS. And Freedows, which begat the equally successful Alliance OS.

And don't forget Haiku OS, which nobody knows what it is or why anybody'd bother working on it -- it's another one of those JoS-style "announcement engineering" projects, where they've got 200 pages of elaborate plans and a really beautiful, artistic, state-of-the-art website... But no working code and nobody trying all that hard to write any. They're too busy appointing committees and making plans to make plans to debate their plan-making proceedures.

Rule of thumb: If a project has a website already but hasn't yet released a working alpha or prototype, it's unlikely ever to release anything at all. If the website is plain-vanilla HTML 1.0, maybe there's a slim chance, but if it's got CSS? Forget it. Just a bunch of losers playing with themselves.

There aren't many things too big for two or three programmers to whack together a halfassed prototype/proof-of-concept (or at least proof that you HAVE a concept) and get it running. You don't need a website for that, and you sure as fuck don't need graphic designers and a logo. I seem to recall hearing about some Finnish guy banging out a fubar'd first crack at a Unix-ish OS kernel all by himself some years ago... And THEN he asked for volunteers.

Be Inc. gets credit for at least releasing a usable operating system (I was quite fond of it, though I didn't use it much because no useful software ran on it), but they get a big fat Cock-in-the-Face Award(TM) for providing a "solution in search of a problem" and therefore failing utterly in the marketplace.

http://haiku-os.org/

Or better yet; clean, efficient and intuitive.

I recently wrote about some future distribution ideas for Haiku. Please check it over and tell me what you think.