What Has Become of BeOpen.com?

avdi asks: "BeOpen.com was once one of the crop of promising free-software based dotcoms, basing their business on selling corporate support contracts for the open-source development tools they also maintained. They were even the center for Python development at one time. Now, however, Python has moved on; their web site is out of date; their supported software cannot be downloaded; and they are unreachable via email. So, has BeOpen.com silently gone the way of many other dotcoms in these hard economic times, and if so, what has/will become of the open-source software they once maintained?" I tried calling the contacts listed for BeOpen.Com, and the numbers for both the administrative and techical contacts were disconnected. Not good news for those interested in the site, but maybe the software projects they housed managed to find new homes. One can hope...

"I recently became interested in a couple of XEmacs-based open-source development tools, namely Infodock and OO-Browser. A quick search on Freshmeat directed me to a page at BeOpen to download these tools. The BeOpen page was simply the top-level of a Freshmeat-like open-source application directory; when I finally drilled down to the listings for Infodock and OO-Browser they directed me right back to Freshmeat. This despite the fact that BeOpen has some lengthy product pages providing overviews, contract prices, and documentation for these tools. Everything, in fact, except a link to the source tarballs. ftp.beopen.com was unavailable. Eventually I tried emailing them at one of the addresses listed on the product pages. The email bounced.

Does anyone know of other repositories where it can be found? Is there any other group who might take on maintenance of these, software packages?"

Comments

It BeClosed.Com

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but too obvious a joke.

Try here

[rinkjustice]

What Has Become of BeOpen.com?

I dunno, but there's a metric tonne of Be software under development at Sourceforge.
A simple search using "beos" as a keyword will work.

"come off crisp and play up to the cynic
clean and schooled right down to the minute"

Re: What has become of BeOpen.com

[bweiner]

As a founding officer of BeOpen.com, I can tell you that BeOpen.com did indeed go out of business in November 2000, like many dotcoms, due to insufficient revenues. (People liked much of what we had but didn't want to pay enough to maintain the fairly expensive staff overhead.) The BeOpen.com web site is broken because there is no one to maintain it.

However, all the open source technologies released from BeOpen.com are still available, if somewhat hard to find:

Python 2.0 - www.python.org
InfoDock - www.sourceforge.net/projects/infodock
OO-Browser - www.sourceforge.net/projects/oo-browser
Hyperbole - www.sourceforge.net/project/hyperbole

Regards,

Bob Weiner

Re:How quickly do Ask Slashdot questions get poste

[avdi]

That would be me. Yes, it really did say "Rejected" on the submission page. I wasn't imagining it. Honest. Apparently, in the language of Slashdot editors, "Rejected" actually means "Accepted". Wierd.

--

BeOpen had nothing to do with BeOS

[avdi]

It was just a badly chosen name.

--

Re:Both Infodock and OO-Browser now at sourceforge

[avdi]

Thank you very much for these URLS. I'm happily playing with OO-Browser right now :-)

--

Both Infodock and OO-Browser now at sourceforge

[snoot]

There's files available for each:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/infodock/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/oo-browser/

Re:Both Infodock and OO-Browser now at sourceforge

[stilwebm]

I guess Sourceforge provides a better home for all of the projects. Combined with changes in the industry, it looks like there wasn't enought business for BeOpen to stay open.

BeOpen

[Satai]

Just before Python moved away, I remember being in #python on openprojects.net and somebody who claimed to be a VP of BeOpen was talking to me. He needed help on where to upload a CGI script (python based, of course) to the BeOpen web site. Anyway, at one point I mentioned that I was doing work in Python at my job - he immediately tried to get me to outsource to GvR and a few of the other people.

My response, of course, was that doing so would put me out of a job.

And come to think of it, he promised me a t-shirt for walking him through the ftp thing. Rotten BeOpen.com. ;-)

Some info at Linuxgram

[Cmdr. Marille]

not much but still:
http://www.linuxgram.com/newsitem.phtml?sid=108&ai d=12102