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Be, Inc. Says Cash Can't Last Past Q2
psyklohps writes: "Excite News has this story about Be Inc. and how it is quickly going down the toilet. It's a shame when a company creates a really good product and then lets it die by lack of advertising and not making any commercial applications to run on their own OS. Who knows? Maybe it will be released as open source? (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?)"
The ZooLib cross-platform application framework allows you to create multithreaded C++ applications with (or without) GUI, networking, and a single-file database format from a single sourcebase and deliver native executables for BeOS, Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.
It is open source under the MIT License.
ZooLib still needs some work before it reaches the 1.0 release but it has been in use in some commercial products for Mac OS and Windows for years.
You can download the source, the demo application source (which you will need to build the main source), and binaries of the sample applications built for BeOS, Mac OS, Windows and Linux from:
- SourceForge
- BeBits
It presently does not build on:- Visual C++ for Windows
- BeOS PowerPC
- BSD
- Other POSIX variants are unknown
all of these are being addressed and some of them should be fixed in the next release.If you don't want to wait to write a Windows application, you can use Metrowerks CodeWarrior Pro for Windows or the Windows cross-compiler in CodeWarrior Pro for Mac OS - CodeWarrior has much better compliance to the C++ ISO standard than Visual C++ anyway so you really should be using it if you want to write portable code.
I dont know of a better desktop OS! Would be nice if the relased the gui so that it would run directly on top of linux kernel, it already is unix like, would be a challange but would be the best of both worlds!
I agree strongly.
The BeOS could almost entirely eliminate Linux on the desktop, because it's a single-user multithreaded OS, the essence of what Linux should be for individual use. It's ludicrous for there to be the arcane user/group/other hierarchy on machines that a single user logs onto. It's additional overhead that can be stripped away. If BeOS became Open Source an XFree could be merged in. The BeOS GUI is neat, but the apps just aren't there.
I'd have to say that GNUStep, as an OpenSTEP clone, has better APIs then Be _ever_ had. When the _Be_ APIs were under development, they tried in a lot of ways to model them after OpenSTEP, but choose C++ as a language; that IMHO, crippled the APIs a good deal.
Actually, that's just over 1 year ago - if my memory serves me correctly (March 28, 2000 was the free download of R5 PE). Be has been doing surreptitious updates of the OS with the help from the community (ie OpenTracker, etc.), as well as the occasional driver updates - it's just that much of the work was released either on the OT site, or on BeBits.
----
Anonimity Sucks.
Andrew 'Skippy' Martens
andrew_martens@hotmail.com
Actually, I recall the QNX advertisements from about 1985 when QNX was explicitly marketed as a desktop OS. According to the ads, it was meant to be a Unix replacement with less demands on hardware horsepower than the real thing. I'm pretty sure QNX was retargeted at the real time market only later when they didn't have much success on the desktop.
A wonderful company is ... and some people may lose their jobs, too. Yes, had to think the same as you. Still the latest news on their site is dated the 22nd of March, an agreement with Sony, so it may be a bit early for the funeral arangements.
I became interested in the BeOS prior to R4. It was stable, it was fast, it just felt good. I kept upgrading it, and became more interested in the OS and the community around it. The BeOS phenomena began growing until the point Be went public, at that point everybody in the BeOS community felt that the BeOS was going to make it big time. Bebits was thriving with new apps, hordes of developers were doing a great job.
Be Inc felt the rush of the stock market, and they rushed out BeOS 5, a badly finished product, notably less stable than its predecesors. But still good enough, at least for the BeOS fans.
New software companies where embracing the BeOS as the platform of choice. Be Inc promissed improved OpenGL support, new network stack faster than BSD's, multiuser support. And then, Be Inc made the dumbest possible marketing decission move to a non-existent appliance market The only thing that kept BeOS afloat where hordes of developers that believed in their superior technology and loved developing with the BeAPI. By moving to the appliance market they did a poor service to those developers. Quite a few companies withdrew their support to BeOS when they knew about their BeIA plans. Some others stood up and kept watching Be Inc closely.Shares went down
My BeOS 5 crashed badly, couldn't recover
The BeOS community shrunk, and those that still supported Be Inc were hoping that one day, they might come back from their flirt with appliances and keep doing a strong desktop OS
Be Inc isn't even close to what it was. It's community of supporters is fractioned and heartbroken
They have what is possibly the best OS you can run on a PC, they just didn't do their marketing homework, nor did they bring a killer app to the OS
I am a computer geek and as so I like it when my computers run properly and reliably. BeOS made my nipples explode with delight on those grounds. I just can't stand the bloat of MS software or the huge amount of layers of code that 'Linux the desktop' is running on every click I perform.
From all I know it is VERY unlikely that the BeOS will ever be opensourced, at least not the whole of it. Some of the code they have in it, had to be developed under strict NDAs. Some of Be's developers supported the idea of opening the source to the OS even before BeOS 5 was released. But there isn't much Be Inc can do about it. They might release it as separate components under OSS licenses. But all the stuff that they can release wouldn't make a compilable OS, so they've also lost the battle of getting OSS developers on it. Who is gonna develop for an OS that you cannot even run.
It is just TOO FUCKING SAD to see this happen
I'm gonna miss the BeIDE A LOT, the BeAPI too, the best FS ever BFS, and so many other goodies that they have delivered
I am so fucking disapointed
Long life to Be Inc developers, slow and painful death to Be Inc marketroids
They wouldn't, most likely. Open sourcing BeOS, if it *could* be done--a big if--would simply be a way of helping to ensure that BeOS wouldn't die with Be, the company.
Unfortunately it will be more than just Be that dies when they go under. There is a whole mass of web sites and software developers and others that will have to find a new focus. At least as OS/2 had IBM and its cash reserves. Come to think about it a lot of the news sites for BeOs (benews.com) had almost regular stories of software firms ditching BeOs support soon after 5 came out. Its a shame because it really is a good OS. AtheOs seems to be designed similar. I bet they would get a good leg up if at least part of BeOs was opened. Oh well...
"What are the three words guaranteed to humiliate men everywhere?
In Republican America phones tap you.
Last September. I would not call 6 months ago "recent"...
A note to what ever moderator moderated this down. It is not a troll.
I actually own a BeBox. Be sold those boxes at a loss, and I still had to plunk down about $1500 for a barebones dual 603e 133Mhz box (basically the case with the motherboard and CPUs, nothing else, no monitor, nothing). A year later I got a PII 233 and it smoked the BeBox at almost everything. If Be had continued with the BeBox they would be dead and gone 4 years ago.
:-)
Now is anyone in NL interested in getting a mint condition BeBox 133?
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
Thought y'all might find that interesting.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I thought it was so... obscure. Even here.
Granted though, it's one of the better Japanese series out there.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
The work "Imagineer" never stops making me giggle. Sounds too much like "Chief Desktop Mouseketeer" or something.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Well, partially I say it because I'm not a programmer. I like programmers, I admire programmers, I'd like to be one. (I'm not very good at - I like gotos and I don't get recursion ;)
But the Mac, like other mainstream OSes is targeted at non-programmers, so their needs come first. Good dev tools _are_ important, and Apple would have been in much more dire straits longer ago had it not been bailed out by Metroworks. But that's not _enough_ of a reason to buy NeXT.
Besides: if NeXT were so easy to develop for, and every progammer's dream, why did that not help it become viable? On the programming front I suspect that a BeOS-derived OS X would have been no worse than the Mac at least, and as NeXT has been mismanaged and a big money-loser since inception, could've gotten picked up for a song a little later.
Can anyone who's programmed on the traditional MacOS, NeXTStep and BeOS weigh in with their opinions, please?
Lastly, the 'look' of the UI is important, but that's not what I'm talking about. I mean the way that things _work_ when you interact with them. Their appearance is important, but not everything.
For instance a modern car does not look a hell of a lot like a car from nearly a hundred years ago. But the underlying UI - wheel, pedals, shifter - are basically the same and you could drive it. A totally malleable file structure like the Mac's is very different than a rather rigid one such as on Unix. For someone used to the former, the latter may impose too much unwanted structure.
The gist of it is that people may very well be demonstratably more efficient with computers that enforce things like that. But they may also be unhappy. The Mac was intended to make people happy by doing whatever suits them, no matter how stupid it is to an outsider. Often the way the designers hope that users will follow is helped along, but that's chiefly done by making it so damn good that people gravitate towards doing it that way and never realize that perhaps they've been hoodwinked.
It's kind of difficult to explain, really. But there is a definate Tao of the Mac, and I generally haven't seen much else that was like it.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It's 'cause Unix is a fuzzy concept anyway. While technically things like /usr or /var or /etc may not be part of Unix, and the OS can be implemented and run without them, I rather suspect that many people plunked down in front of such a system would have difficulty using it and identifying it as Unix without being told.
Unix, at least as I've understood it, is the whole environment, and not just some specific piece, like the kernel. Strip away too much of that environment, even for good reason, and it's not too Unixy after a while. At which point you should ask, why go through the trouble of using Unix, if you're going to use it so selectively?
Popup folders, and that stuff was not listed in relation to the file structure, they were just examples of things that for whatever brain-dead reason aren't around anymore. I suspect you could implement most of it on Unix, it's just that Steve is kind of a prick.
Spatial memory, btw, is metadata. It's information that describes other data, specifically how it is organized in some kind of space in relation with other stuff. Which sounds kind of dumb, but God knows it's nearly the entire point of experiments with 3D apps. HotSauce springs to mind. Consider your real life desktop. In my experience, most people tend to put related objects in proximity to each other; they don't keep them all in a single alphabetically indexed stack.
Perhaps people are doing things wrong, I don't know. But if they like organizing things that way, I say let 'em.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Who the hell wanted to be like NeXT? They lost money like it was going out of style as though they were an ur-dot-com. Never had a business strategy, never had a market, never had good hardware for the workstation crowd or good software for the microcomputer crowd, insanely bad management, no killer apps.... They were good at what, again? Oh right - having the most money they ever took in be their sale to Apple.
Here's a question. Did you ever see NeXT running on your friend's computers? I own a NeXT Cube, and yet I have only ever met one other person in the world (irl) who was using their OS, and that was seven years ago. I can't say that I saw Be much more than that - one friend had both BeBoxes - but neither was ever popular.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Yeah, I still suspect that Be was intended to be sold to Apple and take it over from within as ironically happened with NeXT. I really don't see, having used it, the greatness of their OS. As for their other software, I understand that it's become rather outdated, but is/was good. If so, given how strapped they were for cash, it probably could have been bought up by Apple at the NeXT bankruptcy proceedings if nothing else.
;)
(have you been to the dot-com auctions lately? Man are they a blast. If only FuckedCompany and Ebay would team up on doing something like that... it would probably go out of business
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I know where it comes from, but the other factor is the market share. If there are enough users on a platform it will attract programmers who like to make money.
If there are no users except the legions of programmers that write for it, whoever makes it will either have to work for free - which is more or less what's been happening with Unix for ages, and is okay - or will not work on it at all.
I recall that Doom was originally written on NeXT. I've even played it on my NeXT Cube. (it's pretty bad in 2 bit greyscale with DPS as a graphics engine) But the money came from DOS users.
For most general purpose computers, software can be ported across platforms. If NeXT really wanted to make money from their IDEs they would have gotten them running on Windows and on the Mac. But no one has ever accused NeXT of making money.
I do realize the importance of dev tools though, really. If for no other reason than that Bill could extort all kinds of nice things out of Apple in the 80's by holding the BASIC that they licensed from them for the Apple II over their heads.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Neither was NeXTStep. Not if they wanted to actually migrate Mac users over. Both would have to be foundations. Significant issues existed with NeXT - porting it to the hardware, rewriting the graphics engine so as to not have to shell out to Adobe, but mostly making it friendly, which it is not. It looks like it ought to be, but it's not particularly for Mac users. We already have conventions of how to accomplish things, after all.
Regarding the Be dev APIs, it's entirely possible that they're not good. I'm not a programmer. OTOH, for all the acclaim that NeXT had for their development environment, it did not really help them in the market. There is a chicken/egg matter with regards to programmers and users, but of the two, I suspect that programmers are more portable. If Be had bad development tools, why couldn't anyone have made better ones? Making an entirely better OS strikes me as harder.
As for the UI, it has a lot to do with Steve being a prick. The single most important rule of UI is to create something, test it, and modify or scrap it based entirely on ACTUAL USER TESTING, then repeat. It's too convenient that the NeXT UI should be almost perfectly suited to the needs and wants of Mac users, and the flaws that are getting cried out about aren't getting any more than token attention from Apple.
Steve was convinced that the NeXT was the best, but never actually tested it. Except in the real world, where it was a demonstratable flop. I don't buy the idea that Apple tried to do anything with their UI - which IS the foundation for users - except to slap a six-color coat of paint on it.
Am I defending the Mac from a technological standpoint? God no! It was lousy as anything. I am defending how well it worked for people sitting in front of it though. The UI developments were the soul of the Mac, and needed to be preserved and improved. Neither has happened.
Apple may be stuck with NeXTStep for the long haul, but I think that haul will be very short. That these words should come from someone who's used Apples since '81 and Macs since '86 ought to scare the shit out of Steve and co. I'm staying with the MacOS despite its problems because it's nevertheless better at letting me do what I want. After that, probably a backwards step to Windows, which is equally lousy as OS X, but has a future, support and is cheap.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Yet even as the raw number of macs sold has gone up since Steve returned, the market share has gone down.
The competing Wintel platform is so popular that its sales have gone up at a far far greater rate. It's somewhat tougher for people in that market, as margins keep getting thinner and thinner. (Apple's got it worse of course - they can't even try to spread it out a little)
Until these last couple of quarters everyone but Apple's been doing great. They, on the other hand, seem to have got the Titanic band playing away....
Now it's beginning to look like the US market is saturated: how popular is Apple abroad? Not very. They seriously overcharge the foreign markets (at one point it was cheaper for British Mac Users to get a ticket to New York, buy a Mac, stay overnight, and fly back than it was to get one in the UK) prioritize the US above them, and are getting/going to get destroyed by the ever-powerful home grown market. Because with generic hardware, pirated software goes a long way. In Israel, a fairly up-to-date place, I understand virtually no one uses Macs, but virtually no one pays for software either. This helps MS in the long run though, as they are standardizing on their platform and will probably pay sooner or later.
You could, after all, walk in to any computer store in the entire world and stand an excellent chance of never seeing a six-colored product. But I bet you'd find a CDR with Win95 somewhere.
Already I had doubts that even had OS X attracted users and alienated no one, that Apple could survive. I wanted them to - I've been using Macs since '86, and I think they've got the best UI around.
But OS X is not a Mac, and if you think of it as what it really is: A new OS altogether, and as such it stands a snowball's chance in hell. NeXT failed because '89 was too late to introduce a new OS. BeOS failed for a pretty similar reason. If you had something that flawlessly ran Windows programs and ran on x86 hardware (as I predicted OS X would have to rapidly become) you might have a small opportunity, but unless the breakup had occured MS would do everything in their power to destroy you, a la DR DOS. (which in '85 had the GEM GUI that Apple killed off, but was fairly good)
It's possible that Apple may pick up some Linux users, but they'll have to deal with the crap Apple is known for spewing, ("Did we say that your computer would run OS X? Sorry.") the expensive, slow, incompatable hardware that's plagued it since the beginning, and frankly OS X is useless at certain things Linux is good at and you'd expect OS X to be good at.
I mean, where are the OS X terminal applications that are special? What about remote desktops? Unique applications - aren't any. Stability? Naw, OS X has been crashing on lots of people, including me, frequently and hard. OS X is too much like NeXT to be considered an interesting E theme. But it's too little like MacOS to retain the traditional userbase that, if they're going to get shafted, might as well get shafted with a cheap Wintel box so it hurts less.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I could discuss the reasons why NeXT failed, but I'd probably run into some kind of maximum post limit on slashdot.
Read "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" for a pretty grizzly account. I haven't read the new bio of Steve that came out fairly recently yet, so I can't comment on that. To get some of the other background though as to what NeXT was up against, and some of Steve's history of screwups at Apple (particularly the Lisa and Macintosh) check out "Fire in the Valley" and "Infinite Loop."
(hell, you can get a good and accurate idea of Apple's and MS's souls just by looking at their street addresses)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
And they still weren't widely adopted as I understand. Perhaps there is less to their popularity, given the importance of other factors, than I had been led to believe.
Not all that is good is popular; not all that is popular is good. The NeXT dev sw could have made programming so easy that only 5 year old children can do it, freshen breath and wake you up in the morning. But did anyone ever care enough to buy and use the thing? Unrequited love doesn't keep people in business.
I don't think that it was worth the price, because as much as people talk about how great it is, I suspect they're not using it now, and weren't using it then.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It's not that Unix is inferior. It's that Unix is not a very good desktop - and a very bad replacement for the Mac, if you actually like the Mac. (and the few remaining Mac users like the Mac a lot ;)
For me, as long as Unix is hidden, I don't care. Little elves could make the computer work, provided that it doesn't crash. That is not equivalent to saying anything like 'just don't use the terminal.' There is a lot of baggage that comes along with Unix - such as the files structure, or the security model - that are anathema to the Mac.
However at the point at which you successfully get rid of all that, there's very little left of Unix that's still useful except perhaps the kernel.
OS X has a lousy, though cool graphics system. The file system is rather rigid. UI advancements like spatial memory, label metadata, popup folders etc. that have been on the Mac for years and years are gone with no replacement (or no feature-complete one) much less anything better. It continues to tie users to a nonstandard hardware platform. The compatability box has a few good things going for it, but not nearly enough. (it ought to boot from a ram dump, for starters)
I strongly suspect that BeOS was developed solely with the intention of replacing the MacOS by having Be get bought by Apple. I think that it would have done a good job with more work and more resources. OS X, OTOH really is NeXT Step, all over again, with a different logo. For users familiar with both, there's not a big difference.
NeXT may have been favored by Unix users - who generally wouldn't know an all-around good UI if it bit them in the ass, I'm sorry to say - but it wasn't ever a viable substitute or replacement for the Mac. It wasn't then, it isn't now.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
And you probably wouldn't want to be Criswell, or you'd predict that BeOS would become the only OS by 2014, at approximately the same time that clones of famous movie stars are available for purchase at your local Sears. ;)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Besides: if NeXT were so easy to develop for, and every progammer's dream, why did that not help it become viable?
:) I was at college at the time, which does mean anything > $150 is "damn expensive" - although I think it was nearer $3000.
My memory of NeXTStep from the time it was released was that the developers edition was damn expensive for something that you didn't know anything about!
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
nuff said
Plenty of faster Sun servers coming down the pike; don't believe that Sun is sitting still. However, Sun's taking forever to get the Ultra III out is hurting them.
How can you even *say* this? Where's Be's counterpart for the Interface Builder or Project Builder? I doubt their API could hold a candle to OpenStep. Can you honestly say you would rather use C++ than Objective C?
Me, I'm using OS X right now, but the UI isn't the Mac's.
That's kind of funny: everybody in the old NeXT camp is complaining that the GUI abandons too much of the clean and elegant look that NeXTSTEP had. For me, it just has too much of a "cotton candy" look to it.
Because Jobs didn't realize that Intel had the architecture market completely sown up. Yeah, it sucks, but no operating system was ever going to be successful on an expensive and proprietary architecture (no matter how great that hardware might be). Also, Jobs was a lousy businessman in comparison to Bill Gates, which had a good deal to do with it.
I mean the way that things _work_ when you interact with them. Their appearance is important, but not everything.
Can you give examples of what, specifically, you find unpleasant?
For this article it should be spelled mayBe
Help fight continental drift.
>> Netscape couldn't release Mozilla because of the RSA code that was in it.
> And they didn't - they started from scratch and produced an entirely new Open Source Mozilla tree.
This is not true. They ripped out the offending stuff, then released. Then everyone saw what a mess it was and started over.
I *tried installing BeOS on some 586 laptops once. Oh my god, it never supported any hardware that was old or moblie -- much less both. I was never impressed with BeOS on my workstation either.
As for opening the source to BeOS it would be worthless. You couldn't use very much of it with linux or BSD without just using it as a guide. (ie using the windowing system code for a window manger.)
What I want to see is Mac OSX ported to x86. FreeBSD has lots of drivers already. Also apple is too dependent on motorola and ibm for cpus as it is... they need to branch out into new markets. I'm sure you can convert MS users to OSX with a small marketing team. Once it has native MS office steve can get bill back after all these years. Are you listening, Steven? =)
i don't know how much money Be was wanting, but I think it was probably less than what Apple ended up paying for NeXT. I know Gasee was wanting a seat on the board. This was all during Amelio's tenure, when they deep-sixed the Copland effort. But then Jobs got wind of this and decided to open up a can of Reality Distortion Field on Apple's execs, and now we have what we have....
I remember being so in love with BeOS. God it was fast and beautiful compared to Apple's System 7.x. I had been waiting for pre-emptive multitasking, dynamic memory allocation, etc. etc. etc. from Apple for so long, and then there was BeOS to come along. JOY!!!! There were a lot of apps for it, and a lively development community, but i ddn't want to pay for software for an OS that hadn't been officially released. There WERE/(are) apps for BeOS, and some darn good ones, too. Just some of them were too expensive for me for the amount of time I spent in BeOS. I really admired the work they did on this OS. They did so much from the ground up, and tried to do it right. From the ground up. Not like MacOS, Windows.. Very refreshing.
It gives one pause to wonder why it is that it is so damn near impossible for another OS company to make headway in the consumer/business desktop market. No matter how great it is.
How about Betamax, Dvorak and Tessla while you're at it?
I haven't seen anything out of Be since their free download of BeOS Personal probably 2 years ago. Of course, I haven't been actively checking.
:)
;)
I liked Be a lot better when they were a hardware maker, with dual PPC 603 CPUs and a custom "Geek Port" for hacking the platform. What was it, like 59 pins?
But I am glad I didn't tell my boss to buy teh stock last year when she was looking at it. I told her to wait until they had a proven market.
Good luck, Jean-Louis Gassee! Maybe Apple will hire you back?
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
<TT>> 4. Gassee has kept Be alive on virtually
> NO PROFIT for eleven years. Do you honestly
> think he's going to let Be die now that they
> are standing on the brink of a vast ocean
> of a market?</TT>
As someone who worked at Be for three years, I can tell you that they were in business for 11 years DESPITE Jean-Louis Gassee, not because of him.
JLG did his absolute level best to keep the company from succeeding, by being completely unwilling to let the company do serious marketing. In the time I was there, three VPs of Marketing quit because they were not allowed to do their job.
My prediction is that Be's IP assets and some engineers will be acquired, but that you can say goodbye to Be before July.
This is a tragedy, because the product was amazing, and the engineers who worked on BeOS were brilliant, committed, and extremely motivated to succeed. Two years ago BeOS could do things that *still* can't be done on other "advanced" operating systems.
Be's impending death is genuinely heartbreaking. Hopefully there are lessons to be learned, like how not to treat developers, and how to not neglect your product in the marketplace...
Michael Alderete
Former Be Webmaster, Product Manager
This filing from Wednesday seems to have the exact same verbage as the filing from Nov 13, 2000 and Be has annoucedsome good things since then
http://biz.yahoo.com/e/l/b/beos.html
Heh, c'mon, Notepad and calc.exe both squirt all over Star Office. SO sucks ass. The Gobe suite was cool, even back when I was using BeOS, but I wasn't going to shell out the money for my non-primary OS. You know that I didn't mean "no software" in a literal sense, I just wasn't too happy with the selection. Go easy, though, I came here not to bury BeOS, just giving my own reason why I didn't stick with the platform.
Cheers,
What part of positive and negative numbers do you not understand? They didn't break even, either. RedHat lost money. Please go get a copy of their financial report and read it for yourself before bothering the rest of us again.
Cheers,
No, RedHat is not making money. Didn't you just see their latest financial report? It just came out last week or so.
Cheers,
i agree fully. opensourcing beos will save the platform. and provide for future releases. imagine cvs'ing the latest beos kernel nightly! a community would form much like the debian developer community, to maintain beos code. Be's financal collaps may be the best thing to happen to Beos yet!
lets talk about dead platforms ...
MacOS X is selling well. All ppl say that MacOS X is dead, and how BeOS will kick their ass.
BeOS .. cash running out !? .. hmm .... that's funny
> If only they had actually open-sourced their
> operating system when they first started out.
> Then they might be one of the industry
> leaders. They might be planning a takeover
> of Microsoft instead of talking about
> bankruptcy.
We've been able to download the OS and all
necessary development tools for free for
quite some time.
Please explain how making the OS open source
would have saved the company.
It's like OS/2, only without the apps!
I don't have a good name for it yet, but I think I'll probably release it eventually as "hello world".
--
You're a suburbanite.
Sony's evilla appliance uses the BeIA. Check www.benews.com for info.
Yeah, how dare someone make an anti-Microsoft comment.
Was it a justified comment, or a gross overgeneralization?
It was a gross overgeneralization.
Does person X know anything about the Windows 95 codebase, other than that it's regarded as crap by Linux users?
No he does not.
Do most Linux users know anything about the Windows 95 codebase?
No they do not.
Therefore, with no data on the quality of the Windows 95 codebase, how can you make a statement regarding the quality of the Windows 95 codebase?
Answer: You cannot.
Is Windows 95 unstable?
Yes it is.
Is it possible to make it more stable?
No it is not - not if you want to keep full DOS compatibility.
So was the comment warranted?
No.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Apart from the Wine developers.
Get a clue. Oh, sorry, it's Slashdot. Any anti-MS comment gets applause from the floor to the rafters.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Its not very easy tho. In the situation Be is, with Apple rather annoyed at them, and a track record of playing fast and loose and getting caught violating the GPL, they'd _have_ to do it the legal way through a clean room implementation. That means one team reading the source and then explaining those ideas (in writing, I suggest) to the team implementing the new code. Expensive.
No, I think hes right. Without Linux a lot of the free software development creating synergies for the large unix vendors wouldnt happen. The software base would erode, as the Unix vendors moved into the mainframe area and left developers with the choice of spending money on very expensive development equipment or moving to NT. The free software base would be much smaller, and Solaris boxen whose only purpose is running Apache with various free software arent exactly unusual.
Simulations software would be written to run on NT clusters instead of unix clusters.
You'd have a much smaller base of new developers and not nearly as many people who could function as sysadmins.
Microsoft could hitch their profit margins even more. Now they cant because they can be replaced and will be replaced if necessary.
Linux, I think, is the saving grace for the unix companies. And for all the people who want a future without rebooting every single electronic device in your house daily.
To be pedantic, I'll point out that the original BeBox had dual 66mhz 603s. A later incarnation had the 133s.
-Aaron
The Register has this story about the first round of layoffs at BE in response to their cash-starved-ness.
-Aaron
Nows the time for Apple to scoop up the BeOS engineering team and get them crackin' on Mac OS X. Otherwise they're gonna go work for the enemy and we don't want that. They sure as heck aren't going to sit around and support the BeOS for free, if it turns into OSS.
That's a hell of a lot better than just letting them fade away and forgetting about them.
There are plenty of products where you wouldn't care (or even notice) it they faded away.
Wanting it as OSS is a compliment on their work.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
There is a history of all this (Apple & Be) on one of the Be web sites. (I can't remember which one.) Interesting reading.
Basically, JLG fucked it all up with arrogance. He thought he had Apple over a barrel and was going to screw them hard. He wanted a lot of money -- and almost got it. He pissed too many people off with his attitude and Apple dumped him for Jobs and NeXT.
Too bad, Be was a killer OS and could have really helped Apple move to something other than an MS pet to be trotted out whenever the gov't questions them about "competition".
(The web site was very pro-Be and pro-JLG -- the entire article seemed to be of the slant that "that's JLG's personality and he's so great you must forgive him".)
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
How about a fully-multithreaded, 64-bit journaling file system?
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Couldn't Mac OS X be the 'miracle' you say is required to save *BSD? As long as there is a commercial version of *BSD (and a prominent one from Apple at that), there will be people willing to support the free *BSD versions. If nothing else, Darwin will be the free *BSD version to survive.
----------------------------
yeah, your probably right, but i would hope that people would be unlame enough to respect a company that is trying to help out opensource/linux.
©o,,o©©o,,o©©©o,
BeOS R5 is one of the three operating systems I have installed on my machine, and that I use on a semi-regular basis (others are RH7, which I'm still trying to patch to some semblance of stability, and Windows 2000 Professional, which isn't great, but a hell of a lot better than any previous MS offering). I boot into Be whenever I need something quick. Just need to check my email, or want to read UF before I leave the house? BeOS. Nine second boot on this machine (500mHz P3, 640mB RAM, although it booted just as fast w/128mB), including a bunch of weird scripts I run at startup. OpenGL - the spinning teapot - isn't too great, this is true. However, Be has been working hard at getting a fully accelerated OpenGL library out the door, and benchmarks have proven that what's already been developed is quite speedy. I haven't been able to grab Gobe yet, but what I've seen looks pretty impressive.
My favorite feature is definitely the API. Yes, it might not beat NeXT, but it's probably the best C++ toolkit I've ever seen. No scary macros like MFC, weird Loop classes that you have to construct to run your events, no half-assed OOP like GTK+ or Qt (and I like them both too!). It's just beauteous, plain and simple. I can write an app in Be on a napkin in a restaurant because it's so easy.
I will be very sad to se Be go, if that happens. I'd even put up some money...anyone for Cosource?
well, it was just leet that they bothered.
How we know is more important than what we know.
They sold me out a while back like I am sure they did a lot of other folks. I highly anticipated the release of BeOS 4.5 because it was finally going to support my video and scsi controllers. Sadly, I was mistaken. They didn't end up making things work right until version five, but by that time, they decided they didn't want me to view Be as an OS with any kind of potential any longer. No, instead they went down the path that everyone seems to think is "my future". "The future of computing will be in internet appliances". I have news for the people who think internet appliances are the hottest new thing around: the market doesn't want them. People aren't going to spend hundreds of dollars on a machine with limitations placed upon its use, when for a slightly higher dollar value, you can buy a general purpose machine. Same thing goes for console systems. Ask Sega, they don't seem to be selling as well lately. I really had high hopes for BeOS. They left me standing there without a platform for the future though, not the other way around.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
They may already be planning Open Sourcing the main OS (not the IA part). They've recenty registered openbeos.com
You fucking asshole! A lot of people are gonna be out of a job and ur like, "maybe it will be open source, wink wink nudge nudge". FUCK YOU! You are going to hell!
Actually LinuxPPC does have difficulty getting anything out of Apple, they get a bit more out of Motorola but the core of LinuxPPC is a handfull of hardcores hacking on the hardware until it works.
Car Talk rules!
Sigged!
For starters, read the fucking article. It states that Be is going to "scale down operations" if no new funding happens. Since Sony licensed BeIA, it looks like new funding is on the horizon. No way would Sony make a technological decision on a company that is going away in 3 months. Think about it for a moment: which self repsecting company would make tactical plans for a product line and not take into consideration the long-term availability of the -most important- component?
Be, as a publicly owned company, has obligation of disclosing any potential threat to it's operations, something like "if tobacco usage is found to be a health hazard, our tobacco-production mught be scaled down". Every company does it, but it doesn't mean they are doomed.
On a side note: thanks, Slashdot, for NEVER EVER publishing any of the GOOD news about BeOS. Your bias shows.
Sigged!
BTW, I only have angst against those who don't pay for the software they use, yet complain when software costs too much.
Microkernel archicture. One cool thing that is does is multithread everyapplication so EVERY app can take advantage of SMP.
Other cool stuf like, mount audio cds as a fs and "see" the tracks as wav files.
It is a Unix.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
insmod kick --after=can
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
If they opened the source and it was GPL compatible, they'd be able to harness all of the platforms Linux already supports and they'd be able to coordinate the companies that produced BeOS software in fact they might just challenge the Gnome Foundation and KDE League in a good old capitalistic contest to see who can the most ass.
In which case they would be profitable.
Just imagine Debian/BeOS... "dr00l"
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Don't know anything about this one.
http://www.openwatcom.org/.
--
Lord Nimon
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I don't know what I was missing, but I really don't feel any sense of loss. To me, it's amazing the level of hardware support between open source linux and closed source BeOS. Good riddance.
well the people who "get it" generally keep their mouths shut and grin, but a there are a lot of people who don't get it that feel the need to respond "sounds like a rave to me." then the ACs generally go nuts on the guy calling him a moron. that's worth having the sig in itself!
...and incidentally, i didn't write that quote, but if you ever find out who did, please tell me!
- j
graniteMonkey: What is "the Hobbit"?
[ding]
alex: That's correct. You get to select the next category.
graniteMonkey: I'll take, "BeOS" for 500, Alex.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
NeXSTEP/OpenStep and now Mac OS X both do a better job of united a unix (FreeBSD) backend with an object oriented user interface and provide a more rapid development enviroment. It is a shame about Be, though...
Isn't that what happened to Atari?
---
Free, original, comedy MP3s!
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
Fix your sig before complaining about the front page:
Moderator's Dilemma: Post, or Moderate...
Sig goes here
How can you even *say* this? Where's Be's counterpart for the Interface Builder or Project Builder? I doubt their API could hold a candle to OpenStep. Can you honestly say you would rather use C++ than Objective C?
Not to mention the fact that BeOS was still in "beta" at the time, and was missing a lot of hardware support. Gasse was playing a bit of a confidence game, he kept raising the price because he thought he had Apple over a barrel.
OTOH, OpenStep was a shipping, mature, proven OS. And it had the PR benefit of bringing prodigal son Steve Jobs back to Apple.
Gasse should have taken the money and run. He has nobody to kick in the butt now but himself.
If you visit linuxppc.org, you'll see lots of references to Apple helping the linuxPPC folks. They have people working at Apple who's sole purpose is to release specs and work with people trying to use Apple hardware.
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I've heard that Zoolib is almost as good as Be's APIs.
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
AFAIR, the BeBox had dual 133MHz 603 PowerPC processors...
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
If Be does go fully open source, while they are not doing so well in fiscal matters, how will they make money?
Acutally one of the developments that has generated the most optimism, then pessimism was the announcement of a login application for BeOS that allowed multiple users/personalities to use the box.
Then a BeOS engineer stepped in and explained that while having changed UID's on login was a neat hack, and the first step, the underlying code needed a lot of work before it could realy be multiuser.
---
---
Silence is consent.
should we not feel bad for you?
.oO0Oo.
Yes, but that's feeling sadness for the user of the toaster.
The corp I worked for went pop at Christmas which screwed me over 'cos I was on my way into hospital at the time.
I ask you should feel sorry for me but please don't give a shit for the company. The skills of the coders aren't lost they just move somewhere.
Many crops are built around the idea of making cash not transforming the world into a better place with a great idea.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Well, they wanted to make on OS for the 21st centuary. Its so lightweight and optimized for data throughtput, that its responsiveness is unseen on other platforms. If there is no need on this owrld for an OS designed for multiple CPU's, lightweight and efficient with a kick-ass OO API, then stop the world - I want to get off.
Revolution = Evolution
" Be has to make their customers happy." Do you know what's sad - BeInc's customers are OEM's, not the poor folk (like me) who purchased several versions of their OS.
Revolution = Evolution
OpenSourcing BeOS will also be a good thing for the BeOS community. It will help by increasing the number of people able to work on BeOS (BeInc is to focused on IA that they cannot allocate enough engineers on BeOS). If you take OpenTracker and OpenDesktop as an example, opensourcing BeOS will improve the OS so that it becomes almost *perfect* - it still has a long way to go before it is perfect. BeOS on the desktop, Linux as the server.
Revolution = Evolution
I agree. A bought-out BeInc can receive the cash injection it needs to finish its OS and unleash the *perfect* OS to the world. Personally, I think that SONY is more likely to buy BeInc out than Oracle or RedHat. Sony has great plans for PS3, and every developer is not to crazy about the current PS2 API set. This is where BeOS comes in, because it has an API which can make developers wet their pants, and the new OpenGL kit is rumoured to be one of the best in the industry. There are almost no dropped frames when working in Window-ed mode compared to full-screen. And that is music to any game developers ears.
Revolution = Evolution
I think that every Mac user who has used both BeOS and the new OSX thinks that Apple made a terrible mistake by choosing NeXT over BeOS. MacOSX is so slow, its not funny. Contrast this to the responsiveness of BeOS.
Revolution = Evolution
"... I didn't like the big clunky icon-y look of it, and I thought the widgets were horrible..." Hmm? BeOS icons (32x32) look so small on anything larger than 1024x768, sometimes I wish the icons were bigger. Since BeOS uses attributes to store icon data, the BeOS community use little thumbnails as icons for pictures. Really neat! On my 19" monitor 1280x1024, I'd like to see bigger icons !!!
Revolution = Evolution
Have you tried LinuxPPC - its disk I/O speed is pathetic. How do you like to run a MediaOS on hardware which cannot reach its peak I/O throughput?
Revolution = Evolution
How much licenced code can there be in the AppServer? Licenced code can be found in the MediaKit (video codecs), the OpenGL kit (SGI), maybe portions of the InterfaceKit where they draw fonts, and a few other sections. The kernel itself is dirived from XINU (buy the book in a respectable book store)
Revolution = Evolution
BeInc have spent $96 million overthe lats 10 years, but are virtually debt free.
Revolution = Evolution
Check www.bebits.com for an app called SheepShaver. It allows MacOS apps (up to 8.6) to run on PowerPC based BeBoxes. The MacOS environment is in a seperate window, with data interchangable between the platforms. In the 5 years since Apple bought NeXT, Be could have implemented multi-user support (its almost there already). I Have an iMac with MacOSX and run BeOS on my x86 box, and BeOS is still in my zealot opinion a much better OS. Plus BeOS needs much less grunt to push the system, that it has more room for growth that MacOSX can grow. If only BeInc had the finances the push BeOS (ie - allocate enough engineers to finish the OS), the OS scene would be much different today.
Revolution = Evolution
I purchased MacOSX ;last week and its a bloated slow pig. BeOS is still my preffered OS.
Revolution = Evolution
Oh, by the way, this is posted with the half-arsed Mozilla port with Flash and RealPlayer pluggins.
Revolution = Evolution
Do you know what your missing - you miss seeing the hourglass in BeOS.
Revolution = Evolution
i would have installed be if it either ran on my 68k mac or my g3 imac. apparently there is no g3 support because apple wont tell them how. i wonder if that could change if they went opensource. i love to run be.
Damn shame. I used BeOS for quite a while when version 4.0 was released, and loved it. The speed and stability were outstanding (especially the boot time!)
:) Heck, who wouldn't? The Pro version had Realplayer, and that was about it. I bought it to support them, but one or two people just isn't enough.
But to be honest, I saw this coming about 6 months ago. BeOS didn't really have much in the way of applications. By that time, those few developers that did support it slowly stopped, and the alarm bells rang. Now you have the vicious circle... other developers stop because the first lot did... repeat until death.
The lack of a decent office suite, among other things, is a good example of how the third party support was poor.
A little more hardware support would have made things a lot more hopeful too. Many people were stuck with black-and-white screens and no sound.
I never found the time to develop for it either. Actually, I'm still a novice at programming in general. I did try to support it by buying the versions they released since version 4.0, but it just wasn't enough.
I think that making a free version 5.0 and focusing on integrated stuff was a big mistake. It's nice as an integrated OS for appliances, but obviously it just didn't take off. Moving to that market was a huge gamble IMO. It would either be a huge success, or fail miserably... and unfortunately, it did the latter.
With "Personal Edition", I'm willing to bet that 95% of users would rather download the free version than buy the Professional one
BeOS was a very bold idea. I honestly thought it would work. But when you look at it, they were basically trying to recreate MacOS on the PC (and the Mac, oddly) But if I wanted MacOS, perhaps it would be far more productive to buy a Mac. Perhaps that's why it failed.
Whatever the reason for its downfall, it's a shame.
I mostly agree but you have to wonder if Be could have done something. Make the drivers easier to write or hold the manufacturers' hands or offer to write the drivers for the manufacturers(which would probably be bad precedent for Be to set). I likewise wonder what Be could have done to woo more developers(if anything)
Be was not arrogant towards Apple
Yes they were. At least Gassee was. When apple was looking at buying Be Steve Jobs and Avie Tevanian(sp) gave a detailed presentation and Gasse, instead of giving apple's board anything, he showed up asking for the money.
"I've got them by the balls, and I'm going to squeeze until it hurts."
and
"A man in the desert doesn't bargain on the price of water" are two Gassee quotesfrom the time.
so, without support or help from Apple, Be had to let BeOS/PPC die
and Be was getting millions in funding from Intel. You can't blame apple for not helping to create a transition platform away from their platform.I think Be used Apple as a scapegoat so they wouldn't have to reverse engineer the G3 powermacs and make a smoother transition to intel.
btw my personal favorite Gassee quote is him describing the CEO that Apple needed "Right now the job is so difficult, it would require a bisexual, blond Japanese who is 25 years old and has 15 years' experience"
designing and building hardware is expensive! Instead of a manager and a dozen programmers Be would have to get a factory, hire employees, more managers , parts, asembling equipment, warehouses, etc. Selling hardware has higher margins because it is a higher risk and requires a higher investment.
single high-performance platform (say 4 PPC chips) and bundled some powerful multimedia applications...vertical markets for lots of dough.
So you are suggesting that Be design and build hardware, the OS, and "some powerful multimedia apps" and then sell it cheap enough that the buyers won't go to Apple, Sun, Digital, IBM, or SGI. Oh yeah and then you want Be to not be a general purpose OS. And you want to take opportunities from potential Be developers .
life sucks doesn't it.
and Be was developing for x86 at the time(and getting funding from intel). Be developing for ppc & x86 provides a platform to potentially move Mac users to x86. Do you really expect apple to help Be? Is there a reason why apple should help Be?
Be couldn't have reversed engineered the code anyway because they have a commercial product and Apple would have sued their asses off.
On what grounds could apple sue?!? Reverse engineering is legal!! Having a commercial product has nothing to do with it. mkLinux, LinuxPPC, NetBSD have been ported to the G3 macs(and i think QNX has been ported to the iMac). Be used Apple as a scapegoat for Be's own (arguablly) wise decision to try to focus itself.
As for the alleged lack of loyalty of the 'new user base'
and how much of the flamers would own a BeBox or a ppc machine with Be on it? The point is that many/some x86 users flitter from OS to OS and back again. It wasn't a bash against Be users rabidness(and I mean rabidness in the good way)
No, I think Be dropped ppc support because it is additional work. Apple, by not helping, made a good object of blame.PPC BeOS users were screwed by both Apple and Be.
all the OS's that you quote that have been ported to the G3 are free
and what is the difference? Be couldn't read the Linux code? They couldn't use NetBSD's code? What do you think apple could do? Pretty much nothing.
According to QNX's Dan Dodge, QNX has been mostly ported to the iMac.5 &number=10
http://www.ann.lu/cgi/comments2.cgi?show=95662666
accusing (x86 users) of 'flittering' between OS's is a cheap shot...some of managed to stumble on the BeOS, and that's where we stay.
I don't think it is a cheap shot. Few x86 users love their OS. It is a tool. A commodity. Many Be users love their OS but many of the people who have tried Be went back to whatever they used before(for a variaty or a combination of reasons). non x86 users are more locked into their platforms and making a change is more difficult than for x86 users
How about doing your own research, design, and innovation instead of waiting for a company to die off. They put lots of money into development and made a damn fine product.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
If Be were open sourced, it would be the greatest gift ever. Be is the ultimate workstation/desktop OS. It really is easier to use, for beginnners and experts alike, and the performance is outstanding. If everyone could just download it, use it, and hack it for free, we might actually see all the new apps and ports Be has been lacking all along. All we can do is hope...
I think if someone wanted to start up a new console, BeOS would be a prime choice for it's operating system.
Think about it, it's fast, pretty, user friendly, and a helluva lot cheaper than liscensing Microsoft stuff or writing your own.
Where's competition when you need it, eh?
Its obviously not a wonderful company if its going out of business. A for-profit company's sole purpose is to increase revenue and profits.
from be's website:
"The underlying infrastructure for supporting multiple logins and multiple users' preferences is there, and the facility will likely appear in a future release."
err, notice I said _WORKED_ as in, heh, without gobs of page rendering errors. Well, that and Netscape's HTML renderer sucks donkey cock, majorily so at that. I have not used Mozzila, sounds kinda of bloated though, err, I don't want a complete f*cking scripting language inside my brower, heh, I want to fucking read with it!!
Oh yah, that and plugins. Shockwave, err, shockwave, and, err, does anybody use anything but Shockwave now days??
Complete well maintained Java VM, always imprortant.
I forget who it was that had a comprehensive review of Be's different browsers a year or two back (when they still had some hope of making it in the OS business, heh), but the overall message was that NONE of Be's browsers was as seamlessly integrated into the OS as other plateforms are used too.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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SUN tries to get some share of the desktop market with thin computers; they also have a new MAGC chip to power the appliances. Buying Be makes sense for them.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
....
plus Unix style directory structure & BASH terminal, & all apps are automatically SMP compatible, all the way up to 8 way SMP systems, with max efficiency to. Plus you can set it up to automatically mount all Drives on the desktop (HDD Partitions, zip drives, LS120 superfloppies, CDROMS, etc), just via the rightclick contextual menu. I've heard reports that those 4 way SMP Genesis PPC Maclones, upgraded with 4 G3/G4 upgrade cards, absolutelly fly using BeOS (BeOS will unofficially work with G3/G4 CPUs, however no one has written BeOS chipset drivers for Apples's G3/G4 chipsets). It has a great installer app to that will partition/format & install a complete clone of your BeOS installation on a fresh partition or HDD in about 5 mins flat, well it seems that quick anyway. There are good apps to, including a Napster client, a winamp clone, the Opera web browser, news readers, FTP, officestuff & FANTASTIC AUDIO MIXING APPS. Oh, the FS is CDDA compatible so you can play audio CDs straight off the directory without needing one of those silly little cables running from your CDROM to your soundcard.
Maybe you just need to learn what you're doing.
Although I take no pleasure in Be's demise, ( I was an original beta I & II tester, and I still own several shirts I bought when the Be store first opened) I think this shows exactly what OS developers are against. Everyone has bashed the Mac saying that it is poorly advertised and too expensive. Why don't they just do this or do that. People also proclaimed that Be was 'THE' OS. It was a multimedia OS and could do things that no other OS could do. When OS X was released they bragged about how Apple was finally able to pre-emtively multitask and used protected memory. Well, guess what folks. Be failed for exactly the reason why I said a long time ago. I don't give a damn how good the OS is, what features it has, or how pretty it is. If it doesn't have mainstream apps, it will fail. If anyone has to duallboot it to run Office it will fail. That simple. So folks, the bottom line is that unless you have mainstram apps (with appropriate file translators. And of course I am speaking about desktop machines, not servers) the OS will fail. And yes, this means that Linux's chance to succeed on the desktop is in direct relationship to how well StarOffice works on translating Office documents.
Single user sucks. I set Windows 9x to multi profile, it doesn't beat true multi-user but it's better. Many people are messing with multiple profiles in their E-mail client, complaining when someone has rearranged they're icons, wanting to hide or secure some files from other family or themself. This would not be neccessary if Windows was at least multi profile by default. Windows XP will be multi-user by default with a colourfull login screen, yet another 'innovation' of MS which already existed for decades but what know one used in advertisment or knew of. :-)
(-% TwistedMind %-)
Same old fud about PPC support I see. There is no way that Apple were going to help Be. The BeOS showed up the woeful inadaquacies of MacOS, and Apple hated that, especially as Jobs wanted to get NeXt (sorry, OSX) as Apples next system. BeOS was running fine on the G3 until Apple broke it. They didn't release the needed specs to fix it and no, Be couldn't have reversed engineered the code anyway because they have a commercial product and Apple would have sued their asses off.
As for the alleged lack of loyalty of the 'new user base' I challenge you to go over to http://www.benews.com/ , state the same thing and not get the flaming of your life.
The idea that Be just dropped PPC support out of spite or using them as a scapegoat is utterly ludricous. It couldn't possibly have hurt Apple for a competitor to drop out of sight. Secondly, Apple has never given so much as a hint of denial to the accusations theat they wouyldn't turn over certain specs to Be, or the accusation that they deliberately broke the ability of BeOS to run on G3 PPCs. It is absolutely clear that Be Inc is not welcome anywhere near a Mac as far as Jobs and Apple are concerned. Furthermore, all the OS's that you quote that have been ported to the G3 are free. According to the compatible hardware list over at QNX none of their OS's support the G3/G4 processors. Try to get a commercial OS on a Mac and Apple will fight you all the way.
As for x86 users, accusing us of 'flittering' between OS's is a cheap shot. We do it basically because we have to. In the search for an OS that runs x86 half decently some of managed to stumble on the BeOS, and that's where we stay. If the worst case happens and Be folds, I would reckon most of us would go to OSX if we could afford a new box, reserving our 86 for playing windows games or running as gateway servers with freebsd. Eazel looks promising as well. All of us would mourn the loss of what most BeOS users believe to be the best OS in the world.
This has been known for several months. FYI the worst case scenario the company is putting forward is that they will have to lose some staff. In the current economic climate this is hardly unusual for US companies. So they have a funding problem. They've still got a couple of months before hard decisions have to be made, and that's a long time in IT.
Yeah - and the funny thing is that ex-Amiga-people (light this crary Dr. Peter Kittel) are working for Be. To bad they did not learn from the past...
>>Netscape couldn't release Mozilla because of the RSA code that was in it.
>And they didn't - they started from scratch and produced an entirely new Open Source Mozilla tree.
Where were you? Netscape was released without the RSA code (couldn't compile) and when people saw the nasty code they wretched in disgust, babies cried, and angels lost their wings.
And then, Lo, they decided to start from scratch and create the slowest web browser ever.
> Who knows? Maby it will be released as open source?
Unfortunately even if Be, Inc. wanted to make BeOS open source, they couldn't really. Many core components of the OS include licensed, commercial code that they can't release. This proprietary stuff is part of how the OS works so well in some areas. Assuming Be went to the trouble to strip out all the proprietary crap (which would take a long time, weeding through all that code), it wouldn't be quite the same OS.
This just goes to show what can happen with commercial, locked up software. As good as BeOS is, it still needs development, and without Be, Inc. the users will be stranded and forced to either abandon it or try to develop hacks and add-ons on their own to keep it up to date.
Don't get me wrong -- I love BeOS, and I hate to see it stall like this. I use it exclusively on my laptop, for everything. But I've never really liked the closed source nature of basically 99% of the BeOS world. There's always a long-term sacrifice to be made for convenience and compatibility (in this case it is commercially licensed components), and the price to pay this time around may very well be the death of the OS.
That's the beauty of BeOS. Its not based on some old, cruft ridden architecture or paradigm. BeOS was specifically built from the ground up to avoid all that stuff.
It's a shame when a company creates a realy good product and then lets it die by lack of advertising and not making any commercial applications to run on their own OS.
Hrm... reminds me of the Amiga 500 and 2500. Here was a computer that kicked ass beyond anything that would come for many years, and yet it died off because of a lack of advertising. It was really a shame too, because Commodore could have very well gained a stronghold on the industry for years to come. Not that Be is all that impressive to me, but it was definitly a good OS and looked like it had some good things going for it.
--
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#nohup cat
Open-sourced. Or maby be will not be.
I got the full boxed NW4.2 5 user version cheap at a flea market (5 Dutch guilders) and I was much surprised that it included Oracle with the package and Netscape Fasttrack webserver.
I agree. It seems to me there was a signifigant market for an os that did multimedia really well.
And the hardware to go with it. A studio appliance.
If they had built such an appliance, they might have gotten somewhere, instead of fiddle faddleing with home users and internet appliance stupidities.
The BeBox was a start. Throw in some very high end sound and video hardware, and a few key apps to go with it, and they would've had something. I know that multimedia people are dying to get rid of their trashy pc's and crash happy macs.
--
vinny the vampire link in your sig is dead.
Listen to Reality!
that is the question
sulli
RTFJ.
Open Source renders software immortal since it immediately becomes duplicated around the world with no central ownership that's susceptible to failure and bankruptcy. Nobody (or everybody) owns open source software so it can't be taken away and buried, just like the air we breathe.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Open sourcing it is better than completely erasing it from history.
Desiring to help their product to survive is a great proof of respect
shame to lose *the* single best platform in existence for multimedia creation.
Be *did* try to get high-end multimedia products
ported to BeOS but it's really not that simple -
and it's very expensive. Knowing some things I
can't talk about, they had a lot of bad luck too.
*cough*
*aprilthefirst*
*cough*
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
BeOS simply doesn't do enough different from other OS's for too many people to justify using it. It was cool to show friends BeOS booting in 11 seconds, and the speed of responsiveness was amazing, even with dozens of apps loaded, but it needed apps and apps were not to be found. All of what it BeOS does you can find in MS, Mac, or Linux.
BeOS had alot of potential, but too little too late.
There may be no future at all for BeOS because BeOS is dying. Things are looking very bad for BeOS. As many of us are already aware, BeOS continues to lose market share; red ink flows like a river of blood. Major marketing surveys show that BeOS has steadily declined in market share. BeOS is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If BeOS is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyists and dilettantes. BeOS continues to falter. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all intents and purposes, BeOS is dead.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Opera? Mozilla? NetPositive? Lynx? That seems to be pretty good right there...
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
It has always amazed me how BeOS manages to do everything backwards.
Now they go open?! This is the first thing you do and after one million code maniacs have worked a year for free, you take it over from there, sell this bundle of code for money, keep most active developers on your "team" , do an IP - go public, spend more money on development, release some useful software (the beta crap you have "stolen" from developers) and release the first official production version blaah...
1000 free beta-testers is better than 10 professional assholes in the corner of your office!
I absolutly loved BeOS, I had no other OS that would give me a functional browser, email, sound, that booted in 9 seconds and looked so incredibly polished.
The problem was application avaliability and hardware support, something that the Linux crowd here should be familiar with. Their failure was in maintaining the OS proprietary and thereby alienating the geek hackers crowd (us). Eventually the made avaliable the free Personal edition, though, a bit too late and still insufficient.
Their management, it seems, saw the writing on the wall and switched to some pursuing vapours of iDevices -- well, from this story, it's clear how that venture ended too.
Nice try, great technology, misguided vision. If they go belly up, I hope at least they will make avaliable for the Open Source community the good parts, because God knows, they've had plenty of it.
--
Kiro
Damn, I missed The Capitol Steps again! It was on last night! DAMN!!!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Okay, it has nothing at all to do with Be, but wouldn't it have been cool if they bought it, or at least advertised on it?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
That's not really that impressive - lnx4win does that for Windows users and QNX (www.qnx.com) also does it....I believe BeOS was one of the first OSes to do that however.
Hadn't they already stopped doing BeOS development? It seems to me that by now their focus is on embedded systems anyway, something that most of the Slashdot community has little use for. I didn't really expect them to make it (remember OS/2?)
Respect for a coproation?
oh, come on now, that's not even close.
It's just another coporation
getting closer, getting closer...
why should I treat a corporation
there you go! i knew you'd get there someday if you tried. you deserve an ice cream cone, young man.
--saint----
Actually it looks like they've owned those names since last September. I guess they realized that the coolest and probably the most powerful operating system on earth means very little if there are no killer apps for it.
Hey man, I gave it a fair shot, but the thing wouldn't boot for me. I would have been interested in trying it out too, but if they can't be bothered to test out Athlons + some oddball components, that's their problem.
Yes, show some respect for a company that made no effort to actually offer anything useful. It was a great platform for surfing the web and looking at pictures/videos. I never understood why anyone would bother with yet another proprietary closed source operating system when there are so many open choices that have LOTS OF APPS available. BeOS chose to suffer the same problem as apple: a severe lack of applications. This was not because MSFT pressured people into not developing Be apps (I'm quite sure they never heard of BeOS). This was because when people tried to become development partners with them they were ignored or told to piss off. I've no sympathies for them.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Nobody around here is clamoring for Win9X code. acidboy
That's because Apple did give the necessary info to Linux developers.
Hell, they even made their own port/variant, MKLinux,
which is based on Mach and a userspace Linux.
(Now that Mach is part of their new OS, it's clear why they did, for practice using Mach)
Since that info is GPL'd, Be couldn't use it, so they were still screwed.
The truth about Michael
Is it coincidence or truth in advertising that when you go to buy BeOS it says "Limited time only" "This offer won't last long"...
.sigs too--
--Yes, I hate
Maybe you will learn how to correctly phrase sentences. ;)
Well, the BeBox, as executed, might have been a bad idea, but clearly they could have sold hardware at a much higher margin than they are currently selling software.
If Be could have focused on a single high-performance platform (say 4 PPC chips) and bundled some powerful multimedia applications, they could have sold these things into vertical markets for lots of dough.
(For example, look at the video and sound editing stations that are currently based on standard PC or Mac hardware, but sold at huge markups.)
yeah and then you want Be to not be a general purpose OS
Right, because the "general purpose OS" market is saturated. If they would have specialized (especially after the Apple thing fell through), they might be still chugging along.
Copland was another attempt, and probably could've worked out. But the designers wanted to get legacy Mac software running natively on it. I don't think that emulators were ever really considered.
IIRC, the main (marketing) problem with Copeland was that it was it would have broken virtually all applications and drivers, but still wouldn't have delivered a fully 'modern' OS with memory-protection and pre-emptive MT OS (that was planned for the next vapor release, Gershiwn). It was a sort of a Mac version of Windows 95, except without the Win16 mode.
There were also various management problems, such as much of the engineering teaming resigning, which left Apple BSing about how Copeland would ship RSN at the same time they were taking out full page ads in the Mercury News looking for lots of senior MacOS engineers.
I don't think Pink/Taligent got anywhere close to being an OS.
I think you are correct that BeOS was targetted specifically to be Apple's replacement OS. It's certainly closer in spirit to MacOS than NeXTStep was. However, if the stories are true, Be wanted too high of a price and there were some personal issues with Gassee (well, there were with Jobs too, but he's the legend there).
look, I was as excited about the beos as anyone five years ago, but they really don't get it. I was looking for an os job recently, so I went to talk to be. most of them are nice enough guys, some of them are total assholes, but _all_ of them don't get it.
they neither understand what they're trying to make nor how to make it. they're both trying to make radical changes and support a non-existent user base.
if they're not doomed, I don't know who is.
It's a shame when a company creates a realy good product and then lets it die by lack of advertising... Look Communications used to be worth something, they had a great product available for people like me in the 'sticks' (high speed wireless), and then they flushed their own proverbial toilet because their advertising model was garbage. Working at a store which retailed their accounts, I saw weekly price changes which rendered brochures and signs useless, and now all I'm left with is a stack of pamphlets which apparently we should 'hold on to' until they release the next phase.
Have you tried using black box? It whips kde and gnomes bloated asses? http://blackbox.alug.org
I remember back in 95? when Be first went public with the new OS and the BeBox. I, as a former NeXT-er, was really excited about the prospect of someone else trying to build an integarted hw/sw platform from the ground up. I quickly submitted an application to be a registered developer (and part with a bunch of my hard-earned money to buy a BeBox), and was told (in a form email): "Thanks but no thanks. We don't know who you are, and we can't just let anybody have access to this technology."
What's even funnier is that two of my co-workers had the same exact response sent to them - all people who had either already created or went on to create successful commercial applications on leading-edge systems.
At that moment, I knew that this would never amount to anything. Even at NeXT, we were never stupid enough to turn away people willing to give us hard money (NSA, students, you name it).
typical american, the world stops at your borders. beos has users in europe, japan and australia.
just another corporation, huh? take out a few key corporations, and america goes down the tubes. don't bite the hand which feeds your markets. BEOS isn't one of them, but that's neither here nor there. But more than anything, Be, Inc has to make their SHAREHOLDERS happy before anyone else. Happy customers helps them to this end, and they can consider me a happy customer. I want them to do whatever they need to do to stay afloat, and if that means they do IP appliances, cool - I want one.
noone's asking you to cry, wanker. corporations are MADE OF PEOPLE AND THEIR IDEAS, bound up in some paper work. what is it with socialists and open source? open source is, in my opinion, one of the worst things for the computer industry. never have their been so many socialists involved in the modern computer industry.
When the news finally hits, I'll pour some of my half-half-decaf-latte on my copy of the BeOS Bible for my homies.
Goodbye to the OS "for the rest of... well, nobody". Damn I loved you.
Goin back to playin with an OS which has apps... OS X.
- I am made of meat.
But it would have been the best thing for both parties. Rather than OSX, which is a minimally worked-over NextStep, which already throws the existing apps halfway out the door, they should have gone all the way to put an efficient, advanced OS in a mainstream platform.
Yes, there are a million arguments against it. But I remember when I first saw BeOS at MacWorld, they were already running a fast Mac emulator (this was January '96 or 7, I believe.) With a lot of work, I'd bet those folks could have done a better OSX than Apple has with NextStep.
I'll tell you why Be is dying/dead/wounded.
/. readers, but no, instead we get lots of this "It's a shame" posts. I suppose if a company is small and pathetic instead of large and evil then it's OK for them to charge money? If MS went out of business I doubt you would hear many "It's a shame" comments.
People want choice.
Yes, you read that right. People want choice, but not between different versions of the same thing. An OS can only survive if it has pros and cons different to other OSs.
For example, someone mentioned Windows as an AOL of operating systems, e.g. for Joe 6-Pack. Well, OK, certainly that's true for the Win9X OSs. Then you have Windows 2000 for business types and people who want to run Windows applications in a more sevure and stable environment and don't mind that games can be a little more tricky to run.
Then you have Linux for people who want a desktop OS but don't like Microsoft, or people who want their shell to be cool and actually support pipes properly, or for the same reason as people want Windows 2000 Server for, except they want to run a proper firewall on it. (Check out Microsoft ISA Server sometime for a laugh).
(OK, so the above paragraph used to be "Windows for people who want a desktop but can't afford a real operating system", and I thought I'd get modded down as flamebait but went too far in the opposite direction... )
Anyway, so that's X86 hardware OSs anyway. Now you can easily see why BSD is dying (Oh dear, flamebait stuff again). BSD is dying because it was only really alive because people saw it as a better server OS than linux, but now that IBM and other big evil corporations are jumping all over linux, BSD is fading into the background (which is more of a shame than BeOS dying, but that's beside the point), because let's face it, it's too similar but has fewer developers working on it. Why run a subset of linux stuff on BSD when you can run linux?
Anyway, so I suppose my post could have been shortened to "BeOS is dying because it doesn't give us anything we can't get elsewhere".
I would add that it was always a joke that Be claimed they had this big kick-ass multimedia OS and yet it had lousy support of multimedia hardware because they didn't market it properly.
Anyway, fuck 'em. I mean they were asking us to PAY for this OS weren't they? I thought that would be unforgivable in the eyes of
Slashdot readers- fucking hypocrites!
Too annoyed to post AC
Graspee
Arseholes have opinions. Everyone is one.
Actually... according to what it said on Lain's Navi, she was running Copland. Oh, and her first navi was actually a 20th Anniversary Mac.
-Henrry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
The "info" is not GPL'd, only the source code. I don't see any legal reason why Be couldn't have studied the GPL'd code and written hardware specs. Then developers that had never even seen the GPL'd code could write drivers.
I would be inclined to use BeOS as a desktop platform, if there were out of the box linux app support. The thing I didn't like about BeOS was the huge lack of apps out there, for a media OS I found the lack of "Good" sound editing software disappointing. I wish I could program worth a shit, I would have done it myself. Don't get me wrong it was fun to toy around with, but that was just about it. Of course it's the same with Linux, I have yet to see anything the quality of programs like Pristine Sounds, Cool Edit, or Sound Forge. I still use Linux as my desktop though, I just have to boot into windows to do sound work, or play games (Half-life). I'll admit it, I'm a brainless musician.
--God, guns, guts The staple diet of religious nuts
Serial Experiments Lain, I love that show. I've noticed alot of ties to Mac(The Navi ?)and Be in the show, don't know if anyone would care but one of the designers of the series has a great site at: http://www.people.or.jp/~ab/index_e.html
--God, guns, guts The staple diet of religious nuts
If this is *TRULY* the case, Xenex,
what about NetBSD? they don't seem to have a prob on any apple hardware... and that code is under the BSD license!
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
Well at least we know the answer is !2 Be now! =(
Back in the day, when Be made multi processor machines and was focusing on the PPC portion of there code there was a time when Apple wanted to buy BeOS and make it "OSX".
Somehow the deal didnt go through (I suspect BE wanted way too much money, as they suspected they would be the next dominate OS at the time) and Apple bought Next.
I'm a troll, you're a troll, everywhere a troll troll. Old Trolldonald had a troll eeyiee eeyiee troll.
For heaven's sake. We have enough trouble on this glorified bulletin board without having to meta-troll. Troll the trolls to see if their trolls, if not then maybe you are. Enough. On to News for Nerds and Trolls That Matter.
And if you're wondering how many times I can use the word troll in one post, here's a few more for you.
--TROLLiTROLLamTROLLdwarfTROLL
Um, MacOS (before OS X) never even had anything resembling preemptive multitasking. This is BeOS's raison d'être - fine-grained multitasking and multithreading so as to smoothly handle many high-bandwidth tasks (ie games, music, movies) and take advantage of several CPUs. That and a completely OO UI and the most painless development you ever did see.
--
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
--
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
-George Carlin
Be, having this great OS, kept showcasing features that weren't quite there. They always proclaimed "excellent for video editing!" and so forth. The problem was (as suggested clearly by the story post) the maturity in the applications simply was not strong enough.
As much as techies believe Be's claims that their OS is a strong multimedia content development platform (we understand that it *is* a powerful OS with great performance, etc), that won't work on the mainstream. Many commercial vendors have trouble now justifying development for Linux. Imagine the push they would need to build for BeOS.
Now, this is not to say that Apple had nothing to do with their demise, but I think this is a big part. To sum it up, they had everything they needed to be great - it's just that their strengths were not properly exploited. (Open sourcing BeOS may have fixed this. Imagine how eager the OSS community would be to build apps. for such a mature and high quality OS!)
Why bother.
Steve Jobs left Apple and founded neXt. Apple "aquired" neXt, (and used it as a basis for OS X) and so now Jobs is back at Apple. Confusion is understandable.
Competition is part of life. Failure is definitely a feature. I agree that you shouldn't feel bad for something that fails.
I don't feel bad for Be. But I do feel bad for the developers. I think the developers have done a good job.
I don't understand the relevance of your toaster analogy. Here's an analogy for you: if you did a great job at work, but got laid off because your company went south, should we not feel bad for you?
"The only rights you have are the rights you are willing to fight for."
Yes, but that's feeling sadness for the user of the toaster.
I don't understand what you are saying.
If I had to cast the toaster analogy into somthing that makes sense concerning the matter at hand, it would be that all of the perfectly operational parts of a toaster get thrown out when one little part breaks down.
You were one of these operational parts.
"The only rights you have are the rights you are willing to fight for."
What use would anyone have from an opensourced BeOS? You could not integrate it's media capabilites into Linux/*BSD, simply because these OS' are really different from BeOS inside. And the things that BeOS lacks most, drivers + apps, well, you can write them without the BeOS sources, too.
You don't seem to see the whole point of BSD. Linux might be better in a lot of respects than BSD. But by far not in all.
What Windows is for Linux fanatics is what Linux is for BSD-fanatics. And partly, they're right - linux is getting more and more an instable (compare mdk 7.2 stability with openBSD, for example) and desktop-oriented OS, as a competitor for Redmond's crap (btw, I'm talking about full linux/Gnu-distro packages here, not the kernel as such).
BSD is not really a desktop-oriented OS, though freeBSD wouldn't do bad on geek desktops, and I've found openBSD much more stable than any linux distro could ever be. BSD gives you even more the choice, freedom (also compare the licenses) etc. than linux does and this is what makes BSD so nice to use. Linux distros don't go as far as BSDs in choice, configurability, stability etc. See the linux-BSD and windows-linux similarities? It's actually kind of the same discussion.
So for companies that want extremely stable and configurable (unix) servers for free, BSD is THE choice! Unless they wanna make their own linux distro.
It's short-sighted to say that BSD is dying. Just that windows users have never heard of it doesn't mean it's dead. BSD is getting more and more users, just not as quickly as linux but that is probably because it's by far not as user/desktop-oriented as linux, so not really for the desktop, and you just gotta know of it to put it up as a server and that's a process that we're right in now.
For BeOS: go BeOS! Everything unix-based rocks!
If only they had actually open-sourced their operating system when they first started out. Then they might be one of the industry leaders. They might be planning a takeover of Microsoft instead of talking about bankruptcy.
This should be a lesson to everyone in the software industry. You can't compete against a monopoly like Microsoft using the old fashioned closed-source model of software production. If people want a closed-source operating system (with all the troubles, difficulties, security problems, and needless expense traditionally associated with closed source software), they'll get it from the established leader: Microsoft.
Open source is the only route to success in the current competitive climate. It may be too late for Be to learn that lesson. But maybe this unfortunate occurence will turn out to be a good thing, since other closed-source companies may learn the error of their ways before they get swept under the rug.
Oh my god! Still repeating that old "make money on support" mantra? Will people never learn?
After all the years that Be has existed, I'm frankly astonished it's lasted this long. What a NeXT wannabe!
I have never seen Be running on any of my friend's computers! Market penetration outside of SilliValley has been nil.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
if you had been able in the last years to look at a beos software database you would have noticed , that there are enuf tools which allow you adding multiuser support to beos. but hey , it`s allways the same with you people , you just look if the software is opensourced and if not you throw it into trash OR you listen to your half brain`d dudes that are telling you what the software is like . I am sure that only 10% of the guys here ever checked beos ONCE , 5 % of them know that there`s more software out than you believe it is (including professional sound/studio/radio/sequencer/image software) , the rest obviously knows shit about be and beos and moreover less than nothing about OS development , modern media ...
Netscape couldn't release Mozilla because of the RSA code that was in it.
And they didn't - they started from scratch and produced an entirely new Open Source Mozilla tree.
Id Software couldn't release DOOM source because it was using some kind of proprietary sound libraries.
So their release of DOOM had no sound support. If it was something more vital than sound support the ripped source release would've been virtually useless.
Sybase couldn't open source WATCOM C/C++ because of the libraries licenced from Microsoft, Pharlap, FlashTek, Blue Sky, etc.
Don't know anything about this one.
KDE couldn't be truly open sourced because of the proprietary Qt libraries used.
And this wasn't fixed until Qt made itself Open Source; KDE never did find a good way to fix the problem while still using proprietary Qt libraries.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, if they had the legal authority to release the code as Open Source, they could also release it into the public domain if so desired. However, they do not have the legal right to do either one of those.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
At least with Be, being a smaller company, it will come quickly.
I'm not sure why anyone would think that they could compete with Microsoft with a proprietary OS. Look at how hard it is, even with a Free OS. I think they realized that, but too late in the game.
But the OS/2 experience taught me something: I will never rely on proprietary software, if I can help it. Proprietary software means Very Bad Things when your vendor goes under, discontinues your product, or changes their mind about what the product is.
Unless the BeOS source can somehow be release (and it sounds doubtful given some of the licensing for parts of the OS they did), once Be dies, that's it. BeOS can still be used, but there will be no new support or development for it. And, once again, the people who really get screwed are the users.
Not me, though...I learned my lesson with OS/2.
What are you talking about? What does the distribution have to do with stability? I mean, it's not like Mandrake is writing a bunch of their own kernel modules to insert.
I suspect what you're talking about is XFree86 4.0.1, which *was* notoriously unstable for at least some people, myself included. Since upgrading to 4.0.3, no more crashes.
But we're talking about X crashing, not the kernel. I'm running 2.4.2-XFS, and have had no kernel instability whatsoever.
As far as creating one's own server distribution, I don't see why that would be necessary. Debian fills that role pretty well, IMO.
You just described the gameplay of Black & White.
>than Oracle or RedHat.
That would certainly finish off Be once and for all . .
We've been hearing about the next great thing that will come from japanese
computing and become the new standard for twenty years, an it has yet
to happen even once.
New processors, whee! New well engineered systems!
Japan has yet to successfully market a revolutionary product in this
kind of area (Though I think the 8 bit NEC pc had a limited
success in Europe). Improving in an existing industry, yes. Putting
something completely new out? The closes I can think of is the walkman,
which really came down to putting decent small headphones on an
existing product.
hawk
Oracle could use it for NC's or whatever they call network computers / thin clients / internet appliances today.
Red Hat would have no use for it, even from a dumb end user point of view, BeOS is inferior to Red Hat Linux for all the same reasons Red Hat Linux is inferiour to Windows 95. It supports even less hardware, it has even less end user oriented applications, and the default interface is even uglier.
Oracle would not have these problems (except the ugliness, which could be fixed), as it would be bundled with the hardware and applications.
You cannot copyright an idea.
The GPL is a license which applies to copyrighted material. It is irrelevant.
Anyone can read the source code and understand how it works. If you then write new source code based on the same ideas, you have created a new piece of software.
You are perhaps confusing "copyright" with "patent".
-Mars
Last September. I would not call 6 months ago "recent"...
This has been debated to death on BeNews. Basically Be needs another round of investments to continue past Q2. This fact has been public knowledge for a couple of months now, so there's no real surprise here.
;-)
But you have to wonder, has the window of opportunity closed for Be? They had a brilliant chance at gaining a few % points of the desktop market. Unfortunately for them it was right at the moment when everyone was suffering from LINUX fever. Coat-tailing on Linux didn't help Be either ("we can co-exist peacefully next to Windows *and* Linux). Today Be is focussing all efforts on their BeIA product. But again, unfortunately, the IA market is not happening. The devices are too expen$ive and/or not compelling enough!
If the BeIA powered Sony eVilla flops, it will definitely be the end for Be as we know it. And IMHO chances are good it will flop (unless some Linux h4ck3r d00d figures out a way to put Linux on it
I learned a good deal from programming the BeOS, it was a lot of fun too. However, Linux is where it's all happening. Linux is moving at lightspeed, as always, while BeOS has been throthling at idle for well over a year now (*). The biggest disadvantage BeOS/BeIA has IMHO: tied to a single commercial entity. If that entity goes down, it takes the OS with it.
And here's a preemtive strike: BeOS will never be opensourced. It contains too much licensed code! Remember how long it took Netscape to clean up Navigator sources! With the money/time squeeze Be is in right now, they are not even thinking about it!
-adnans
(*) From a user/developer perspective
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
It has not been unknown for Oracle to do ridiculous things that are far removed from their core competency.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
No, it was precisely aimed at one customer. Apple.
JLG was at Apple (and presumably still has some social contacts there - my impression is that the Valley is a small world) long enough to know that Blue would not be revolutionary and that Pink was destined for failure.
Blue - so named because the features were on blue sticky notes - became System 7. (System 8 and 9 are not significantly different... there haven't been any updates of that caliber for ten years)
Pink - again with the notes - was one of Apple's first attempts to write a replacement for the Mac. But it died, largely due to mismanagement.
Copland was another attempt, and probably could've worked out. But the designers wanted to get legacy Mac software running natively on it. I don't think that emulators were ever really considered. Too bad that they didn't realize that that was one of the reasons why the contemporary PDM project that developed PPC-based Macs succeeded was practical backwards compatability.
BeOS has demonstratably run on Apple hardware with the old MacOS running in an emulator, and was very very fast, with a good OS and POSIX, on crappy hardware. How NeXT even wound up in the running back in '97, I'll never know.
Me, I'm using OS X right now, but the UI isn't the Mac's. It's not inspiring any loyalty in me to stick with Apple. Who knows - the same might have happened with Be. But I think that BeOS or a successful Copland (which would've been rather similar) would have been better and seen the light of day sooner.
Oh well. It's hardly the first time Apple blew it. It'll just probably be one of the last.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
A wonderful company is going down and all you can think about is "when are they going to make their software open source?"
If you can't help them, and least show some respect.
It seems the obvious response. Think about it. It is the ultimate form of respect. Someone who says "BeOS should be open sourced" respects Be and doesn't want BeOS to vanish from sight never to be seen again when the company dies. If people disrespected Be they wouldn't give a damn if BeOS vanished. Companies dying and their products disappearing always struck me as the most tragedic of consequences of copyright.
That being said, as others have mentioned, it may be impractical for BeOS to be open-sourced as it relies heavily on code licensed from other companies that are alive and well and may not want to open source their portions.
A few years ago they were focused on a very different market than they are now. I think it would have been a mistake for Be, at any point, to try to target both the embedded/IA market and the desktop OS market. While it's easy to fault a business in hindsight for not taking this or that opportunity, a company like Be needs to have a coherent direction that changes based on the movement of entire markets, not its ability to score contracts.
But for Linux appearing on the horizon Microsoft would be mopping up the remains of UNIX like a piece of fresh bread on a plate of gravy.
Oh right, like datacenters running Oracle on 64 cpu Sun boxes or running simulations on 128 cpu SGI boxes were just going to replace them with crappy x86 NT servers, but changed their minds when Linux showed up?
You don't know much about computing outside of the home desktop do you? Yet you post that speculative trash as if it were the God-given truth... I hate it when people do that.
I don't understand, you'd rather they just buried all the code, never to be seen again? Is that a sign of respect? Please explain.
Be's fate was sealed a few years ago, when Apple decided to make NeXTstep the basis of their new MacOS instead of BeOS. I can imagine Steve Jobs in talks with Be and suddenly realizing that if they went with BeOS, he'd have Jean-Louis Gasse--a very bright man who makes major design decisions on the basis of personal animosity or dislike of a piece of hardware--back at Apple. And the horror of that probably clinched it.
It's a better "new MacOS" than OS X in a number of ways, since it was written from the ground up to be a modern OS geared toward single-user operation, but the world can't support two "MacOS"es. So Be tried to do what it could: they reinvented themselves as an appliance OS company. And again, it's a pretty nice appliance OS with very good multimedia guts. But there are a lot of other appliance OSes out there, and most of them allow for more existing application code and development tools (and development skills) to be reused than BeOS does.
The faint smell of desperation that emanated from Be as they kept changing their business plan couldn't have helped them get OEM customers for the embedded version either. They went from trying to be a shiny new OS for cheap hardware, to trying to be a "better" riff on the MacOS concept, to trying to be a niche OS for content creators. And all of that was before they put out a stable 1.0 version. After that, they shifted focus to embedded systems, which left the developers who had been working on traditional desktop applications with no future, and put Be in the position of recruiting a developer base all over again essentially from scratch.
But here's a few lessons that I learned that Be did right (and other companies I've worked for, such as Linuxcare, didn't):
- Have a clear focus. Sure, it'll have to change over time, but have one anyway.
- Focus on what you want to produce, rather than "IPO in 18 months."
- It's better to grow slowly over the course of years than sell out to VCs early. For one thing, this means you don't have to have prissy furniture.
- In Menlo Park, you can get REALLY good couches at garage sales (where Be's couches come from).
- A good company has movie nights in the staff lounge.
- A good company has the CEO on the engineering floor.
- Espresso machines are a necessity, not a luxury (but, unlike TiVo, Be's were clearly used machines).
I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of working with a group of people who were, on average, as multi-talented as those I knew at Be. Hang in there, all of you._Deirdre
I can see RedHat buying BeOS but I doubt they have the extra capital to do it right now unless the price was really good. Since RedHat is highly involved with Gnome they could buy Be and opensource the code and throw it to their Gnome hackers to rip anything useful from to add to Gnome. I doubt they'd bother keeping up a sepperate development of BeOS but they could use it for parts. Some of the Be engineers might be a nice grab for the Gnome project also.
I can't see Sony adding Be to the Playstation and I don't know how well Be's API's would match the PS2/PS3 hardware. They'd have to invest a lot of more time and money into making it all work. An opensource company could avoid a lot of those costs.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
That whole "impossible to find software for it" thing that you admit to totally wipes out your claims of BeOS being useful. And having no software doesn't make for a whole lot of fun, either. I can't say that I found it stable or beautiful either, but I haven't used it since R4, so I don't know how much progress they've made in these two areas. If you like using the MacOS interface, you might find it beautiful, but I didn't like the big clunky icon-y look of it, and I thought the widgets were horrible, although I always loved the windowshading feature that it had. Otherwise it reminded me of what I disliked about the Mac interface.
The whole single user-ishness of it wasn't very pleasing, either. I played around with it for a month or so, maybe two, but even if the software selection had been improved, the interface was just too aggravating. I didn't get rid of it in anger or anything, I just gradually used it less and less until some point I realized that I hadn't used it in a few months. I actually still have it on a partition, but can't say that I'll be returning to it. Kinda sucks, because while I knew it was a long shot, I was sorta hoping that Gassee would stick it to Jobs.
Cheers,
There is a multiuser patch available on BeBits.
who cannot spell maybe.
Moderators... this is not flamebait... this is pointing at lack of journatlistic standards.
Had BeOS been multiuser, I might have given it a much more serious look.
And I'm not just picking at it.. I like lots of things about it. But not having multiuser really bothered me.
I have a good feeling it will go open source, which will be a really good thing for the OSS community.
No, waiting around for companies to die so we can get our hands on their code is NOT a Really Good Thing for OSS.
If it happens enough times, companies will see anything non-Microsoft oriented as an impossible market to make money in and will not develop the products that we need so despirately. Sure, the free development may continue in obscurity, but we need the support of great companies by rallying for the cause!
The absolute BEST thing that could happen for OSS would be a company with OSS values who develops some great widget and makes a *fortune* on support and maintenance and is wildly successful.
load "linux",8,1
If you need real-time, use QNX. It's real-time credentials are better than anything else out there. It's a real-time kernel grown up into a desktop OS, rather than a desktop OS trying to achieve real-time.
http://www.qnx.com/
I think the verdict on that is not in yet. Buying NEXT gave apple a multi user operating system which BE is not it also gave him some degree of application compatibilty and security which BE could not. Already you can run most BSD apps on MACOSX.
Overall the next platform is much more scalable then the be platform is and it has great dev tools too. Time will tell but I think it was a good move for apple.
War is necrophilia.
Oh yes that notepad really rocks!
War is necrophilia.
"Be has to make their customers happy."
What part of going out of business makes your customers happy. It seems like they were burning their bridges as they were spiraling into the abyss.
Just another corporation gone no big deal one of three businesses fail.
War is necrophilia.
Respect for a coproation? Give me a break. It's just another coporation and a failed one at that. One out of three businesses fail and no human being should shed even a single tear when one folds. Corps come and go they have no souls they deserve no respect or pity. I don't cry when my toaster breaks I go get another one why should I treat a corporation any differently.
War is necrophilia.
How much is that property worth if BE goes under?
War is necrophilia.
It wasn't oracle or sony it was Microsoft. When Apple was desparate MS poured money into it to keep it alive (see we have competition really we do). It also attempted to the same with Corel (see we also have competition in office software too!). Maybe MS will dump a bunch money into BE just to keep them alive.
My cat catches mice and continually lets them go and catch them again basically torturing them to death and then eats them, maybe MS enjoys playing similar games with other corps.
War is necrophilia.
Because Microsoft owns the desktop market. Apple has to get out of that ghetto and enter into server space where no one has a monopoly. If apple stayed in the desktop markey it would be fighting for crumbs. MacOSX gives them at least something that can act as a server.
War is necrophilia.
Man I don't know where to start. First of all the "synergies markeetroid speak is all bullshit. Red-Hat needs to start showing profit NOW. Buying a company which can't turn a profit is just plain dumb. Especially considering that they make no software for it. If like you say you can't get your work done using linux how the hell are you going to get you work done using BE? NOBODY and I mean NOBODY can break the stranglehold that MS has on the desktop. Doing that is going to take years of erosion and innovation. If BE was able to penetrate the corporate market they would have by now. Apple can't do it, AMD can't do it, Micron can't do it what makes you think redhat can do it with BE. It's amazing that Red hat has broken into the corporate space which is notoriously conservative to have them risk what little penetration they have with a useless OS like BE is just silly. Remember that redhat bought cygnus and already has made inroads into the embedded space they really don't need BE.
As for oracle. Oracle makes money on three things. Database licenses, enterprise software, and consulting/service. They have zero desktop software and buying an operating system which has no apps for it just makes no sense. Maybe Ellison himself can buy it because he is interested in this type of thing and he has the money but Oracle shareholders wouldn't stand for this kind of waste of money.
My guess is that nobody will buy BE. Maybe some of the companies that make BE software can pool their money and attempt to keep the OS alive but I wouldn't bet on it. If anybody does buy it it will be for purely for play not to base a business on it. Unfortunately it looks like it also can not be released open source so it will go on the scapheap of really intresting software that could not make it in face of the MS juggernaut.
War is necrophilia.
What does socialism have to with open source? You are confusing software developement with a political party which has extremely tiny percentage of the population.
Corporations are not made out of people they are soul-less beings. People work for corporations and when the corporations fail they work for some other corporation. People are "human resources" or "efficiency units" to corporations. They are kept around only as long as they serve some use to it. They get routinely canned at the whim of the corporation. People are nothing more the oxen which drives the corporate cart.
I was wise enough not to have any money invested in BE so I did not lose a penny. I don't even feel sorry for the shareholders who got screwed it was their stupidity that got them into trouble.
It has nothing to do with socialism. Capitalism is every man for himself. The corporation cares for nothing except making money and it should be the same with you. You should feel exactly the same loyalty towards a corporation as that corporation feels towards you. Same goes for respect.
I might give some change to a beggar on the street because he is human and has a soul but I would walk past a dying corporation without a glance.
War is necrophilia.
MS did rescue apple. It was more then just money it was also a publicly made commitment to apple. Bill Gates announced to the entire world that MS was ready back Apple. This came at a time when apple was struggling and would have eaten through whatever cash reserves it had in a hurry as it was bleeding money.
MS at this point could have simply said "not enough market share" and pulled the plug on office for the mac and killed apple in one fell swoop bit it did not. It needed to maintain the illusion of competition and did it by making apple it's puppet competition. MS propped up apple when it was going to fall there is no two ways about it.
War is necrophilia.
Once again. How much is that property worth if BE goes under? A failed OS which could not make it's company sufficient money to keep alive is worth next to nothing especially since there are no significant apps written for it. Once Be fails that property is worthless. Six months after BE fails you will have to pay people to take it away. Remember it's going to actually cost money to keep developing it and whoever buys it is going to lose money on it too.
BEOS is worth nothing. You either throw it away or give it away but I doubt very much you are going to find anybody who pays anything for it. I suppose somebody might offer a buck or two on the off chance that they could do something with it but I find it unlikely.
War is necrophilia.
Not much of an endorsement.
BE the amiga of the new millenium LOL!.
War is necrophilia.
Hey Be, want to know how to stay alive? Port your GUI to Linux/BSD. I know I'd buy it, beats this X crap I currently put up with...
©o,,o©©o,,o©©©o,
And the BeOS developers couldn't read the Open Source code to LinuxPPX and MKLinux? They didn't support Mac hardware because there was precisely ZERO revenue to be derived from doing so. It was convenient to paint Apple as the bad guy, but Be is a public company and wasting money on what was a dead end platform for them isn't usually something that endears you to your shareholders.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
There's supposed to be a mourning period.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I cried when my toaster broke.. I was really hungry and it was like 2am and all I had was stale bread and I didn't want to eat it stale.. That toaster was my salvation man.
How we know is more important than what we know.
werd. I cant help feeling that people with this attitude have never put their heart and soul into a business idea. I almost feel like going down to their offices in Menlo Park and singing some songs or something (I could be just bored), anyone else in the bay area wanna come along?
How we know is more important than what we know.
" Even at NeXT, we were never stupid enough to turn away people willing to give us hard money (NSA, students, you name it)."
Umm, which NeXT are you talking about?
I've heard of at least one incident of SJ turning away about $10mil worth of business before he gave up on the "it's only for education" line.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's unix-like, but single user only. Forks, execs, etc. all there.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Uh, Xenex, the GPL means they cannot simply copy the CODE, without also GPLing their version of it.
As fasr as looking at it and using the information about the hardware it enshrines, anyone can do that, without any encumberance by the GPL, or any other license.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I don't think that BeOS has enough momentum to justiy itself as a single entity. It is very hard to take a closed source base and open it. Witness the difficulty in Mozilla, Tomcat, etc. Not enough outside people are familiar with the source code and it has a strong chance that it will be full of holes and bloated (at least to some degree) even if the code base is rather excellent it still won't be at the same quality level to which we are accustomed.
... lets hope that it is GPL and Free Software so that we can at least integrate its technology into other areas (Linux, KDE). I think this would make much more sense. Take apart it's kernel and put relevant (and solid/stable) pieces into Linux. Add the GUI stuff to GNOME/KDE.
What would Red-Hat do with be?
What wouldn't they do? Stock price is depressed, though through some creative accounting, they've managed to be approximately break-even.
Acquisitions at discount prices might bring in interesting assets that create "synergies" - investor code for moving that stock up. Then again, they'd probably pay at a premium and see RHAT go down:-( It's a crap shoot, but don't forget that many (most?) of your acquistions are fed by egos and fuzzy marketing paradigm talk. So we need to (gasp) answer the question in fuzzy marketing droid land.
Be might also provide a solution to one of the biggest negatives of RHAT - that it's a geek-driven server OS. Sure, you might enjoy spending a few hours a day working under the hood of your desktop. Having built a company on the existance of Linux and running it throughout my house as I post, I still have to fire up Win2K to get business work done (Visio / Excel / Word / Powerpoint / MSProject have no real competitors - sorry!). Be changes things for RHAT by finally giving them a real client for the 95% out there and might compel enough Wall Streeters to believe that RHAT is *the* candidate to take on Microsoft (who, sorry Apple folks, is presently uncontested).
Bottom line: Redhat Linux + Redhat ClientOS (BeOS renamed) gives us a total package for the corporate environment (and gets them creeping into the consumer market). If RHAT is earning their paychecks by providing service, they need to play on Linux's present Internet server (web, mail, dns, etc.) dominance while they still have it and dislodge Microsoft before they strike again (not to mention the nibbling by the *BSDs).
What would Oracle do with it?
I concur with the technical observations referenced above, but don't forget Oracle's wanderings into clientware ("network appliance" land, for example). And don't forget for a second that Larry Ellison knows very well that Microsoft has just about executed their move that'll cut "independent" Oracle out of the foodchain. Squeezed between Interbase going open and Microsoft going nearly desktop (one SQL license included in every box of MCSEloops), he's going to get hammered standing still.
MS-SQL's a predator in its pricing. Larry screwed up by getting fat, dumb and happy off of extortion pricing (same mistake Novell made). The more Microsoft packages end-to-end and makes enterprise computing a single purchase, the more obsolete Oracle's current model becomes. (RHAT's lack of licensing baggage really allows them to leapfrog MSoft here - e.g. "Buy our server and client package and every client comes with all of our application software ready to use. Forget about licensing hassels!" kind of possibilities emerge. And the alternative is what... a Microsoft SPA world where every executable must be registered and hardware checks to make sure you've licensed that MP3? Talk about a perfect setup for Redhat!)
That all said, an Oracle/Be deal is most unlikely due to the personalities. Gassee thinks he's too much of a celeb to subvert to Ellison's leadership. RHAT shouldn't make the same mistake - OS comes and Gassee has a Sculley "evangelist" role.
This all said, you need to look at some of the roadkill to see what's in store for Redhat and Oracle (and haunts their execs, compelling evaluation of deals like this):
Infamous "Server Only" companies
- Silicon Graphics
- Sun (who's trying to escape that with languages, tools, etc. but probably won't be enough in the longhaul)
- Digital (acquired by a client hardware company... how dehumanizing!)
The same goes for "database only" companies, I'm afraid.
Bottom line: IF ubiquiteous net-based software clients are to be the future, Redhat had better move quickly to get the other half of the equation, and might just become a real threat (with newer tools and newer distribution models) to Microsoft. A serious threat that Balmer loses sleep over.
Oracle? Long shot acquirer, and probably relegated to being a lesser tool provider. Larry should be happy, tho, since he got much more than 15 minutes...
*scoove*
(Whew... three lines of a short JonKatz post... my fingers are tired!)
Ironic, isn't it? Gassee will lose out on his dreams of a good GUI on a BSD variant because Steve Jobs pulled it off with Apple's support.
I've liked the be demos, and I'm sad to see it happen. it's just an interesting way to look at it.
...and start an open source project to recreate Be's OOP APIs. They were the interesting part of the system anyways (IMHO).
Actually, I always wondered why Be never did this themselves. They might have seen more apps ported to BeOS had they done so.
The work I am doing with the Linux Quality Database is inspired in large part by a desire to bring this kind of quality to Open Source and Free Software systems. I use Linux on a daily basis in my own work now but honestly my experience of it wears me down and I fell so... refreshed whenever I restart into the BeOS.
But it is clear to me that Be, Inc.'s troubles are due to lack of wisdom and commitment among its management despite the best efforts of its engineers. From the start, Be made very little effort to market to the public, even though anyone who ever tried the BeOS immediately liked it and usually wanted to run it on their machine.
After a while it became clear that Be had problems keeping its commitments to its developers. I lost out on a lot of evenings and weekends spent developing a product that didn't sell well when I could have developed another product for the Mac OS - I was well into one for the Mac but gave it up for the BeOS. The investors who funded BeatWare and Adamation lost millions of dollars on their BeOS development efforts; the companies were only saved when they ported their products to the Mac OS and Windows.
Read about my observations about the difficulties that a number of companies have had surviving in the turbulent world of High-Tech, including my advice as to why business partnerships with Be are best avoided:
- The Valley is a Harsh Mistress
Learn how I am working with others to take the power from the hands of the OS vendors and put it back into the hands of the third-party developers and the public:- Freeing the Developer from OS Vendor Shackles
Read a rather blunt summary posted to Be's developer mailing list about how disappointed I was that the company had failed to live up to the promises it had made to its own developers who had labored hard, and usually with little or no compensation, to bring great applications to the BeOS:- Some of Us Work for a Living
That was the last message I posted to bedevtalk; the moderator unsubscribed me because he felt it was inappropriate to discuss business matters relevant to BeOS third-party developers on Be's third-party developer mailing list.Be dug their own grave. If someone comes to their rescue with new funding, I'd like to suggest that the package include a new top-level management team with a mandate to shake things up. Firing the sales-prevention team would help.
I'll be sad if the BeOS dies and I hope they do open source it. It is likely that it uses licensed technology so that they could not legally open source the whole thing; let us hope they take the route netscape did and remove the proprietary parts and allow the open sourcing of the rest, rather than allowing it to die.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
...or how about VxWorks from WindRiver?
- j
Yeah, but wouldn't it be nice to have all of that in ONE os? Unfortunately people didn't seem to think so...
Maybe Apple should buy BeOS now. Just ask for all those OS X cd's they sold last week back, and say "Oh no, that was just a test thingie. We REALLY meant to release THIS." and send everyone BeOS.
how shocking
Did you actully READ what Pheersum said: "Since that info is GPL'd, Be couldn't use it, so they were still screwed"
There, explained in one sentance why they can't just read the Linux PPC ports code. However, you could explain it in three letters 'GPL'. And they call it the license of freedom...
And I also have a few versions of BeOS too (infact I bought R4.5 after the free R5 announcement because I didn't want to wait to get a new version, and the discount I got on R5 was pretty weak).
All Be have done is state that their IA platform is not licensed in such a way it requires it's customer to open their source, which, believe it or not, is a selling point to Be's market. So many people have called BeOS 'a Linux' or 'Linux-like' that Be has to combat the myth that they BeIA is under the same restrictive (to commercial interests) license as Linux.
Like this article shows, Be is going broke. Of course they are advertising every single feature of BeIA that they can - this is a company trying desperatly (almost in vain) to keep afloat. It's just one of these 'features' goes against the beliefs of alot of open-source hackers.
Open source hackers don't sell IA's. Big companies do. Be has to make their customers happy.
http://www.escribe.com/software/beusertalk/m40678. html
Also, I don't think some guy that might work for Be saying it's not going to happen means anything.
Also, they might only open up parts of the code that they can without pissing off others. There's still hope.
--
Free Mac Mini
irony (r-n, r-)
n., pl. ironies.
1. The fact that the word Mormon is only a letter away from the word moron.
Yeah, it's amazing how much that one letter separates me from you, isn't it? :)
--James (zpengo) the Mormon
Got Rhinos?
I am a BeOS zealot OpenSourcing BeOS is the best thing that can happen to BeOS. Not because it will be scavenged by vultures, but because all the little gripes which are preventing BeOS from being *perfect* will finally get the manpower BeInc cannot provide. The little bug which causes Opera and RealPlayer to take out the AppServer can finally get fixed. The little issue with mmap() can have manpower solving this problem. BeOS isn't perfect (*gasp*) but with extra developers pouring over the code it just can be perfect. BeInc has focused on IA, hence it cannot allocate engineers to continue working on BeOS. BeInc has opensourced some components of BeOS (OpenTracker and OpenDesktop) and they have improved immensely. Any developer who has spent more than 5 minutes tinkering with BeOS has wet their pants. Its internals are a testament to what excellent engineering can produce. Ie to create a window and display it all you need to do is instantiate a BWindow class and show it. ie: BWindow *myWindow = new BWindow(BRect size, "name", window_parametrs); myWindow->Show(); To add new views, all you need to do is instantiate a BView class and append it to the window. GUI elements are equally easy to implement, and the messaging implementation is really sexy. The environment is OO based. After spending a few years with Hungarian notation and the Win32 API, you really never want to look back after trying the BeAPI. I would love to see BeOS opensourced. All the little pesks will get fixed/implemented, and BeOS itself will be a fabulous joy to use. Its speed, footprint and efficiency are almost unparalleled in the industry today, and can provide the injection BeOS needs to become a mainstream OS. BeOS on the desktop, Linux in the server room. A marriage made in heaven.
Revolution = Evolution
Well, until I find another system which actually responds to my mouse-clicks when I actually click them (not 4 seconds later), then I will convert. Right now, no other platform is as responsive as beOS. I dont care about the latest IE6 browser and GeForce3 support if I have to stare at an hourglass while waiting for my emails to download.
Revolution = Evolution
XINU on steroids, and kernel services are reentrant to allow multiprocessing. Every design decision was tailored to enable better throughput of data (multimedia), which literally means that they made security tradeoffs in order to enhance multimedia. As a result, you will not find anything as responsive in todays PC world. Its responsiveness is really sexy
Revolution = Evolution
I've been a huge Be fan for years, and I bought and used both Be and Gobe Productive, but honestly, Gobe Productive is a blatant ripoff of ClarisWorks. And if I'm not mistaken, much of their core coding team used to work for Claris. Just the start up/new document screen is damn near identical to previous versions of ClarisWorks. Of course, ClarisWorks is now AppleWorks, which has been updated to compete with MS Office. So not only is Gobe copying another program, it's copying an old one.
--
I'd guess they were trying to prevent cybersquatters or something. There's too much code in the BeOS that belongs to other companies... Be, Inc. would have to gain permission from all of them if they wanted to Open Source the OS. Basically all we can do nonstop updating of OpenTracker & OpenDeskbar, but that's about it.
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
That's kinda the way I felt when I first read that. Although I love OSS, there's kind of a strange feeling that comes about from scavenging the remains of dead companies. Especially ones that made really good products, but for whatever reason, couldn't take them to fruition within the market.
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
Linux Vogue.
It has style, it has grace.
Tux the mascot, gave good face.
Programmers with an attitude,
Linus Torvalds we love you.
Vogue, vogue
Open Source with an attitude
Programmers in the mood
Don't just stand there, lets get to it.
Get a distro, theres nothing to it.
Vogue, vogue
BeOS, you've got to
Let your code move to the music
Oooh, you've got to just
Let your code go with the flow
BeOS, you've got to
Vogue
advertising does away with the applications problem.
the file format compatibility problem.
the hardware support problem. -Poof!-all gone.
"Proper Advertising" can bankrupt a company like Be in 2 shakes.
Likewise developing many core applications for your OS or desktop environment is a tricky thing. Don't do any, and people will claim your platform is "underdeveloped and immature".
Do a lot and you're rapidly shoveling money into a furnace, while simultaneously chasing away people who might have entertained the idea of selling such apps themselves on your platform.
Be was setup to be bought as the next generation OS for Apple. For better or worse Apple committed to taking the Mach muKerel route to provide bass'wards compatibilty - 5 years ago! Be has been lost company in search of a market ever since.
RIP, Be.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
Lessee, when did I lose my respect for Be, Inc. ? It must have been right when I read this:
Yep, that was pretty much it.
BeOS is a pretty sleek, well-executed OS. It got everything right that could be gotten right. Be, Inc is MSFT without the market cap.
But the Mac, like other mainstream OSes is targeted at non-programmers, so their needs come first.
Where do you think all the software comes from? If a platform sucks to code on, then the *good* programmers were code on something else. and the software will be crap. And that, of course, is not good for the end user.
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
it's not really that bad.
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Quit using it when they decided not to support the Apple's "G3" PowerPC 750 machines. Be claimed that Apple wouldn't give them the the necessasary info, yet I don't see LinuxPPC having any problems. Maybe I'm missing something.
Anyway, I guess it's sad that they're going away, but I haven't used BeOS in over two years and just recently sold my BeBox.
Exactly. When we talk about M$ code, it's usually along the lines of "I wish they'd open-source it. I could use a good laugh."
--
Dyolf Knip
The Toaster hasn't had ANY market since 1996. NewTek lost out the minute Commodore folded. They kept flogging the same old NTSC, composite only, Toaster/Flyer combo, crippled by the Amiga's underpowered CPU and bus. They also didn't pick up the revolution in nonlinear editing, as the Toaster was primarily sold to SVHS offline suites for A/B roll. The Flyer was a cute hack, but inherently tied to the Toaster board. In the Toaster market (industrial video: educational, corporate, and wedding etc) it's been PC based NLE edit cards powered by Adobe Premiere (since 1996), then DV/Firewire edit cards (starting 1998-1999). Only recently has the Macintosh regained interest due to DV indie filmmakers and FinalCutPro (and Win98's poor implementation of Firewire support).
The Macintosh held onto higher end markets because of Media100/Data Translation and Avid using NuBus and PCI based Macs as their platform of choice. But that's changed significantly, with Symphony and other products being released on NT.
NewTek is now selling a PC/NT based Toaster, but I don't believe it's done particularily well in comparison to Pinnacle and Matrox's (DigiSuite)products. You're completely right that BeOS has no real market: Unless you have a market ruling application (Premiere, FCP) or a industry dominating vendor (Avid), your OS isn't going to do well in the video market.
Calum
Windows has absolutely nothing to learn from BeOS. It's the other way around.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Actually, the reason why RedHat stands to make money is that the profit margin shows they are making 40% profit on every copy of boxed product they sell, and more on services.
This is why investors continue to be attracted- they may not be making money now, but they've proven they have a high profit margin, so when they do become profitable, they'll be poised to make gobs of money.
Granted, M$ has a 95% profit margin on each copy of OS they sell, but no one wants to see a second M$.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Introducing Xfree into the cleanliness that is Be is a travesty. Now, if there were an easy way to make GTK, QT, and X apps work in Be without losing the beauty and speed of Be by dragging it down with X, I'd be sold in a minute.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
What wonderful company? I don't care whether or not they open their source, but they were stupid from the get go.
Be COULD have been marketed to people who do high end multimedia. There is a tremendous need for a reliable OS that can do multimedia really, really well. All Be needed was a few key applications and they would have found themselves in a lot of video and sound studios. Instead they stupidly tried to get into the home desktop market. That was insane.
Linux vendors at least know what they are doing: they market linux primarily as a server OS. As a result, they are not going down the toilet.
--
BeOS is unlikely to be released as Open Source for the simple reason that BeOS is the major piece of property the company has left. If they gave it away the creditors would probably be able to sue the directors. The only real hope is that some company (or organisation) buys BeOS and then releases it.
Oh wait a minute! All of those things have already or are going open source anyway! How is that possible? Simple: the authors have just ripped out the offending components, and rewritten them as neccessary. Problem solved.
Simple. OSS can equal free (as in beer) developers. This cuts R&D costs, and allows you to make money from services rendered.
I think that BeOS would be much better if they had OSS strategy from the start.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I guess I should have seen this one comming, especially after the crew in the UIUC ACM's Be Users Group slowly dissapeared.
Remember, however, that this isn't a "Be Is Going Out Of Business" post. This is a "Be Is Out Of Money" post. And the ever-so-flamboyant Jean-Louis Gassee has always kept goalposts where they have until some date to make some money or else they fold. They may very well get jacked up.
The problem, of course, is that the BeOS itself, as a desktop OS, is not a viable concern anymore. Be didn't manage to grab the desktop mindshare, and instead, Linux is grabbing it. They were going for the multimedia market initially, but nobody ported any really good graphical tools over, which killed that avenue of expansion.
So now BeIA is the last best hope for BeOS. Which is highly dependent on a bunch of other companies wanting to buy it. Except that these other companies are also enthralled with Linux.
I don't have too much confidence in the ability of an Open BeOS to succeed. First, part of the reason for why BeOS is good is the careful and measured design. The success of an Open BeOS is dependent on Gassee being able to still guide the process or upon a new Linus-like cat-herding leader to take up the reigns and make sure that Open BeOS is done right. Second, there could be lots of patent/intellectual property/copyright issues that prevent them from opening up the code. Which means that they need to release a stripped version of BeOS that will require developers to re-implement functionality chunks.
I personally wish that Amiga, Be, and SGI had merged a few years back. But that's blue-sky and slightly irrational.
Gentoo Sucks
And how many supercomputers have you designed or built? I mean big ones with 1000+ nodes, not your glorified SMP boxes. I have built several.
Yet you post that speculative trash as if it were the God-given truth... I hate it when people do that.
Compaq still does quite a nice line of VMS servers that target exactly the market you describe. I would say that VMS had pretty much run its course by now, even if the number of systems being deployed was still rising numerically. Sure if LINUX had not come along pockets of UNIX would continue to subsist in the same gheto as has sustained MVS, OS/360, VMS etc. There are even some folk left who use OpenGenera.
But for Linux, Unix would be facing the same fate. UNIX only displaced VMS in the engineering market because the price performance was vastly better. People would put up with the unreliability, lack of security and scalability of a solaris box because it was three or four time the speed of a VAX.
Today the price performance argument is in favor of an Intel box. I used to spend $10K at a time on graphics cards, today a $500 AGP card will wipe the floor with practically anything.
Any operating system that is limited to the ultra high performance market is ultimately doomed. Without a large user base there is no market for applications - whether open source or commercial.
The mainstream will always overtake the niche market in the end.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The sad fact of O/S life is that people don't buy machines for the O/S they buy them for the applications they can run. No apps, no customers for the O/S, no O/S userbase means no apps, a vicious circle that all but the most ideological libertarians accept. But for Linux appearing on the horizon Microsoft would be mopping up the remains of UNIX like a piece of fresh bread on a plate of gravy.
People get so invested in the O/S which is odd since all an O/S is is something to get between you and the hardware.
The original business plan for Be appeared to be to write the O/S that Apple could not write internaly. The reconed without Jobs and NeXT.
I can't see why any investor is going to finance another round of Be. There are plenty of more deserving dotComs folding for lack of cash.
The sad fact of Be is that the edge they had - an efficient GUI layer that did not waste its time because of a broken threads model is important. It is also duplicatable on a mainstream O/S albeit at the cost of rewritting the applications somewhat.
Windows is slow because the GUI kernel blocks frequently. One bad program brings down the machine. Be was doomed from the day it started, but I would have liked them to threaten Microsoft just enough to force them to fix that particular screw up.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Tell me, without Be, what exactly is Lain going to run on her Navi?
Why bother.
MS didn't rescue Apple by pouring money into them. At its worst point(s) Apple had - and still have to this day - a couple billion in cash reserves. MS invested $150 million in non-controlling APPL stock in '97 in what was widely believed to be the (MS) face-saving tip of the iceberg of an out-of-court settlement for massive source theft of Quicktime code. (Continuing MS Office for the Mac through 2002+ and doing IE for the Mac are widely believed to be the rest of the iceberg, and are much more plausible candidates for just-in-time salvation). john drake 7
I have a silly/simple question for which I could not find the answer on Be's website. Maybe a good, well-composed answer to this question would get moderated up :-)
Question:
Basically, what's Be like inside? It is a BSD-like (or any *nix-like) thing? Are there forks, execs, and SysV-IPCs? Is it a VMS-like thing? Is it a (pre-OS X) Mac-like thing? Or is it just totally a different paradigm? If so, what's the paradigm?
TIA
Part of the Second American Revolution!
What would Red-Hat do with be? What would Oracle do with it? Neither company sells desktop applications (notice I said sells). Is Oracle going to write some magical user application that only runs on BE? That's ridiculus and out of their core competency. Oracle has made a commitment to platform and OS independence. Oracle is probably the most platform independent software on this planet it even runs on netware.
War is necrophilia.
I still have the BeOS personal edition for Linux download that runs from an image on your ext2fs partition. You just make a BEOS directory off the root of any ext2fs mount and put the files in it then reboot using a boot floppy. It then scanned your partitions found the one with the image and up she popped. The slowest part of the boot getting the loader off the floppy!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Does anyone know/have the history of Be from the last 2 years? Last I heard was they were doing the IA (Internet Appliance.) I guess it didn't pan out. ;-(
;-) At the end of almost every chapter was some insight into how BeOS came about.
The reason I'm asking, is because I ordered 2 copie of Be (one was a gift for a fellow programmer friend who loves the way Be was designed) along with the Be SuperBible, which we both thought was a real cool read. ("That makes my nipples hard!" -- inside joke for those who have read it
It's too bad the few mistakes Be made (no multi-user, lack of drivers, and being arrogrant towards Apple) was their demise.
I know I'm not the only one who would love to see BeOS open sourced. Pity that the company must fold though, in order to have that chance.
If this isn't proof of an OS monopoly, I don't know what is...
Err, lets see here now, hmm, no mainstream product, no webbrowser for their OS that actualyw orked, err, no shit, of course htye where going to fail.
Ok, mistake here folks, their OS's MAIN claim to fame was that it could rotate a teapot.
It could rotate a teapot VERY VERY FAST.
Not to say it wasn't amazing, for the time. notg to say I don't think BeOS is a great OS, it is. Quite amazing really, immensly clean and efficent. One lean mean machine.
Lean Mean Machine that sitll doesn't have a browser that proberly renders pages without F---ing up. You *HAVE* to have a decent browser folks. Be released a browser with BeOS that was a demonstration model, designed to hold people over until the real thing came out from a third party company "really Soon Now (C)".
Didn't come, oops, sorry. remember the AMD IronGate chipset. Remember how much it SUCKED. Emmensly, heh, iot relaly really sucked. Ok, so it wasn't downright rotten, but it was relay behind the times folks. BeOS's pack in browser had the sma eproblem. it worked, but it sure as hell wasn't eligent. Let me tlel you, that ONE THING stopped me from buying BeOS. After all, if I cannot play games yet (coming REAL soon now, heh) then I sure as hell better be able to read my usual webpages, and not have to worry about horrid formating errors on them while doing so.
If Be had been smart htey would have relased a fully functional minimaly errornious browser for their OS that worked. ANd what's more, they would have paid some companies to design some KICK ASS development programs for BeOS. Media OS you say? Shit, I do NOT see any decent 3d Modeling programs fo rtit. No, not open Source folks., Face it, that isn't gonna cut it, 3DS-MAX is not open source, neither is Maya3d (I don't like either one myself, I am a Rhino3D type of person myself, but. . . . hopefully you get the point.).
I also did not see alot of video authoring tools for BeOS, if it is a media OS then it sure as hell be able to support EVERY DAMN USB DEVICE I PLUG INTO IT and deal with all sorts of odd end storage devices, after all, video and even high quality still images, lake up alot of spac,e and youneverk now what sort of storage system I may be using, best to suppor thtem all.
BeOS should have enterted into stragistic alliences with the likes of RealNetworks (heh, anyone wanna take bets on how long before they go outa buesiness, heh, I live close to them, I wanna go down to their HQ on closing day and yell something of the likes of "This is whatyou get for not making naything orignal since RealPlayer3.0" or such, not snappy, but damn true) where as the realvideo/audio encoders where on BeOS, whcih is perfectly suitable for such tasks and then had som,e sort of internet delivery support that allowed for BeOS to feed the data to whatever system/OS/.server needed it.
Mpeg2 Authoring, heh, BeOS why not? eh.
Ahole lot of thoer things that a media OS needs to take advnatage of to suceed, BeOS didn't have. Of course, the main problem is. . . . .
At the time BeOS came out, the Macintosh lateform was still considewred a viabale system for graphics work. hell, Apple still had people tricked intot hinking it was actualY BETTER for sucht hings. At about that time it was on par or slgightly better then the PC (talkinga bout oringal x86 release of BeOS here folks) but it quickly fell behind. Even so, peopel bougtht mac's instead of PC's, and those who did buy {C's bought Windows for it. After all,t here wasn't the idea that we need a much more efficent system. Hell, systems weren't yet nearly so powerfull that BeOS's tight programming made such a difference. Strange as it may sound folks, newer PC's will get alot more benifite from 10% increased utilization. Why you ask? Simple, heh, 1gigahert CPU, 10% is 100MHZ, 450mhz CPU, 10% is 45mhz, obviously. As I recall, 450mhz was top top TOP of the line when BeOS first came to the PC, and hell, as I said,
Spinning teacups, all they had.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
[Side Note: check out the Register for their April Fools edition of the website. It's a good poke in the eye with a sharp stick to some of our favorite people]
In any case, with that inflow of $$ from Sony, I do not think that the company is going to go under all that quickly, unless it is bleeding green really bad. The news story might not be be giving all of the details, unless it is one of those things of "well everyone is being careful with their money".
Sort of like saying to a man in the water "well rope is scarce, and we got to be careful on who we hand it out to"
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
FWIW I think Be did the best possible job under extremely difficult circumstances. I mean, obviously the whole idea of the company was to take a pile of cash and some very damn talented engineers and make the new Apple OS. When it became obvious the Apple's new management were not going to buy the company for $Big, they were essentially screwed.... Competing head on with win9x, or a wide variety of embedded unices depending on which story you believed.
That they've hung on as long as they have, that they ported to x86 in double quick time, can only be a tribute to the company's management and the quality of their code.
So why haven't Sony bought them yet?
Anyway, I've said it before - and I'll probably get flamed - but I still believe it: The absolutely best way forward for open source would be to have separate desktop and server OS's. An open source Be would be just wonderful, and this frees up Linux and *BSD for what they do best.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
The problem is that they made a product for nobody...it was nice and userfriendly, but the Mac had had that for years.
As for it's multimedia stuff, Mac had that market cinched up good too. Music, Audio, and video were taken up with Mac.
As for nice to customize, and a loyal following, Linux has that market. Following in that same light, It simply didn't have anything "mision-critical" If you really wanted to follow it, Video Toaster had the video market and will probably have it for some time to come.
But that's just my opinion...I could be wrong.
JoeLinux
http://www.escribe.com/software/beusertalk/m406
spoo
So now BeIA is the last best hope for BeOS. Which is highly dependent on a bunch of other companies wanting to buy it. Except that these other companies are also enthralled with Linux.
Linux isn't the reason why BeIA is a stupid idea, it's because BeIA is almost completely geared towards x86. i work for a company that makes embedded system controllers. let me tell you: nobody in the embedded market cares about x86. it's too bloated and too power-hungry for any reasonably-priced embedded device. a lot of people here assume that when "Internet Appliances" finally come to market they'll be x86 computers in a little box, but they won't be. they'll be small, cheap, cool-running boxes running on MIPS, PowerPC or SuperH chips.
BeIA was targeted towards those Internet Appliances that nobody wants. you know, the ones that are x86 PCs but are more expensive than just buying the parts yourself. the ones that people are keen on hacking up to run Linux when the company making them goes out of business :).
why did Be do this? because they had no no direction, and couldn't decide what they wanted. they made a nice operating system, i know (i owned a BeBox years ago), but they had no direction with it. they had a very loyal fan base with the PowerPC: people who were genuinely interested in using it and developing for it. when they ditched the PowerPC for bigger and better things they left a lot of people (like me) very bitter. and what's worse is that they called Apple's bluff (and moved to x86) and had the nerve to blame it on Apple for "not releasing the specs."
the problem is that in the x86 world, everything is a commodity. it's all about rock-bottom prices, getting the best deal, and using whatever crap hardware you can afford to scrounge up. there may be more x86 users, but they're not as closely tied together as PowerPC users, and Be found that this new userbase just wasn't as loyal as the PowerPC folks. in fact most of them would hop to linux in a second if the BeOS looked at them the wrong way.
i'm sad to see Be go, as i've been following their progress for years, but i'm hardly surprised. they had no direction, no valid business plan, and they completely burned the people that would have been willing to help them: namely Apple and the PowerPC community. they made some great technology though, so it would be a crying shame to not have their OS open-sourced. but to Be, Inc? good riddance.
- j
A wonderful company is going down and all you can think about is "when are they going to make their software open source?"
If you can't help them, and least show some respect.
It's just a shame it was impossible to find software for it.
The company I worked for a couple of years ago filled out a Be developer app, wanting to evaluate using Be for the next generation of the company's retail kiosk systems. Stuff had been built on DOS initially and migrated to Win3.1, and even in 1997-8, thousands of DOS systems were still out there in dire need of upgrade.
So what was Be's response to the application - which would have put Be systems in retail stores nationwide?
"Not interested, but you can buy a copy of BeOS on our website."
$49.00 smart... chapter-11 stupid.
As much as you may want to rag on them, companies like Microsoft and Oracle understand the developer market. Be didn't, ended up with essentially no apps, and is functionally dead.
*scoove*
As much as this would be interesting, I'd have to doubt any such open source "divestiture of the company's assets" would ever sneak past bankruptcy court, let alone the shark pool of shareholder class action attorneys.
Instead, watch BeOS get sold off to Oracle in a sweetheart deal and Gassee get some crazy title like "chief desktop imagineer." This would give Oracle the missing ingredient in its ambition of conquering Microsoft and allow them to mold their offering into a "Oracle-knowledge server + BeOS network appliance" package.
Interestingly, BeOS may be worth more dead and resurrected than in its current form. A functional desktop solves the puzzled for more than a few companies. If I were Redhat's CEO, I'd be on a plane yesterday working the deal on acquiring BeOS, releasing it to the open source world and having (finally) a complete client and server package.
Now there's a challenge for Microsoft...
*scoove*
Many people didn't like it because it "felt" too much like MacOS. I would say, however, that BeOS successfully united a strong backend with a strong user interface, which is the unattainable ideal of seemingly every other operating system.
It's just a shame it was impossible to find software for it. The basic utilities existed, as well as some fun stuff, but the hardcore apps that even Linux has did not exist for BeOS.
I sincerely hope that if Be, Inc. dies, they will at least scatter their ashes among us so that we can take advantage of what existed so far.
And for those of you who have never actually used it, clear off a partition and toss it on there. Get your hands dirty with it, so that you'll understand what we're losing.
Got Rhinos?
Slashdot runs basically no Be articles until there are doomsday predictions.
1. Be has been out of the desktop market for a year now. They are focused on BeIA and the emerging IA market. (And no, iOpener, Audrey, et. al. are not REAL IA's -- show me a broadband, wireless internet device, and I'll show you an IA.)
2. The Excite article is based on their SEC filing. They could have written the article a year ago, because that's about the time Be said they'd run out of money at the end of Q2 2001. However, they always fail to leave out the very large "UNLESS..." clause, which points out they're only going to run out of money unless they get funding. Be will get funding. Hell, if Qubit can get funding two months ago for an IA device, Be can get funding for a kick ass IA OS.
3. Sony has been working with Be for one year on a key part of their (Sony's) IA venture. They had to know Be's situation, there's no way in hell they'd bank on BeIA without knowing Be is going to last.
4. Gassee has kept Be alive on virtually NO PROFIT for eleven years. Do you honestly think he's going to let Be die now that they are standing on the brink of a vast ocean of a market? And you PC chauvinists who can't see the possibilities for IA's are no different than the IBM execs who couldn't see the PC market right in front of their noses, before they made the "deal with the devils at a little known company called Microsoft. You know, back when "computer" was synonymous with "mainframe."
Yes, sadly Be is on the brink of death. Funny thing is, they've been there for eleven years. And they've survived. Come back to me in a year, and we'll see where they stand then.
-thomas
"And like that
Be recently registered openbeos.com (as well as .net and .org)
see this article for more info. I have a good feeling it will go open source, which will be a really good thing for the OSS community.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents