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Palm To Purchase Be's IP
There's been a lot of rumours swirling around an imminent buyout of Be's IP given their current cash situation. But I wouldn't have thought of Palm as a potential suitor - but a story in the subscription only area of today's WSJ indicates it to be true. Hopefully a non-pay service will get the story soon - but looks like Palm is trying to beef up its software side, and wants to get some Be's engineers.Update: 08/16 02:16 PM by H :Looks like C|Net has the details - 11 million USD in Palm stock for the purchase of Be.
Heh, yeah, and maybe they could end up bankrupt like those guys at Eazel who thought it would be a great idea to take the UI skills that they learned from Apple and try to make loads money from the Linux market. As the psycho dad in "Heathers" said, "Showed those fucks." :)
But BeOS surely failed in driver support. Mine and my friends' Be adventure was short because of driver issues.
The conclusion is: Since there is (almost) no driver issue on PDAs, BeOS may suit very well on them. I do not know how much Palm integrate from Be kernel, but they will surely use Be applications and development environment. With the addition of the PalmOS emulator (currently downloadable from their site) we may see many free software development on *nix for Palm.
Heya all. I've been using BeOS for past two and a half years. I will not stop using it, as it does everything I need it to do. There are driver specifications, so I can add drivers if I need to myself. I just bought myself a Armada M700, runs BeOS just great (except for the sound, but for that I'm going to port a driver from OSS/Free). Before people go berzerk, think Amiga, and also think: do what feels good! I'm going to continue using this operating system 'til I see I can't do what I want with it. -- tic, Be Developer ID #E-20392 "As long as a man's dreams are those of sleeping late on weekends, some beer and some occassional snuggling, nobody can ever take those away from him!" -- Marge S. (not a literal quote, but you get the idea)
For those of you who don't remember, When Apple was interested in Be in 1996, Jean-Louis Gasse asked for 400 millions, It wasn't worth it so they went with NeXt instead :)
This is a great move for Palm - with all the handhelds being powered by a more and more powerful OS, Palm needs a real jolt in this area.
Palm's OS will be easy to emulate in BeOS, and BeOS is well suited to small platforms. For $11 million, this is a bargain of an investment for a company that needs a new OS.
Apple did it a few years back with NeXT, with stellar results. I forsee this propelling Palm ahead... perhaps not way ahead, but ahead none the less.
My guess is that Be users, including the exceptionally talented community of Be volunteer developers, will soon be learning why it is that Free Software is such an important concept. Be Inc. has just sold it's intellectual property to Palm, and they soon will be closing their doors, probably forever. Since Palm just paid $11 million dollars for the Be source code, you can pretty much guarantee that they aren't going to simply cough it up, and you can also guarantee that they aren't going to be interested in the desktop portions of the OS. Palm makes handhelds.
In other words, Be as a desktop OS is DEAD and the time and effort spent writing drivers and Be specific applications has just been flushed down the proverbial toilet. Laugh at the "foaming mouth" Linux advocates all you want, at least they had the sense to base their work on software that they could get the source code to.
I don't understand your statements about Unix device drivers. A driver for BeOS is completely unlike a driver for any other operating system.
My BeOS development down the toilet? I didn't have much trouble porting my BeOS apps to KDE because I wrote my code in a modular way - the 'meat' of the application was separate to the OS-dependent port.
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C-YA
Jon
don't forget that the PPC XXXe forms are excellent embedded processors - and Be started out on PPC. And motorola make PPC, and Palm have a "relationship" with them, as the largest buyers of their older 68k line.
JLG treared developers very well at first - at times Be engineers would ask for / offer help on projects. When 4.5 came out most people who had developed applications commented on how quickly their copies showed up.
After the company went IPO they never really seemed to stop the media blackout. Many developers took that hard.
Maybe we'll get light tablets with smooth video, wireless, device connectivity, and GPL software in the hands of the public.
We (might) get unix drivers for all those little hardware doodads that will plug into the palm.. If SD devices can roll out much larger memory capacities I bet this will give Sony's memory stick vision a run for the money. It's basically 200 companies (in SD, pushing SDIO) against the Sonies. Hmm this could all be a war of whose batteries last longer. If so Sony's way ahead.
This might possible be a way for palm to separate out its software palmos side into a separate company without paying a lot of tax, which they would otherwise have done if they had to split palm inc into two companies.