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Palm To Purchase Be's IP

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the odd-combination dept.

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.

6 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. It may sell well on PDAs... by stikves · · Score: 5, Insightful
    [begin irrelevant]

    Have you noticed that most of the OS vendors are trying to be UNIX like.

    Take NT for example. With 2K it introduced many "new" concepts like "mounting", "symbolic links", and "telnet daemon". With Cygwin, it becomes a very good "development" environment.

    BeOS, QNX and alike are trying to be (semi) POSIX compliant from the beginning.

    [end irrelevant]

    OS'es need three basic things: development environment, applications, and drivers. Surely BeOS did not lack in terms of first two. Because it was able to run GCC and many other free software

    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.

  2. OS upgrade a good move. by standards · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:OS upgrade a good move. by Xibby · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not so much the OS upgrade that's a good move, it's getting the components that you need to compete with PocketPC and their check box marketing. (ie...a side by side comparsion of a PocketPC and a Palm, showing that the PocketPC has a faster processor, more colors, more memory, etc. and leaves out the good featurs of Palm like incredible battery life, a decent/innovative interface for wireless devices, and applications up the wazoo. Do you really need streaming video to your Palm?

      MS uses this same check box marketing scheme with Xbox vs. PSX2. Look, we have more video memory and processors, etc. Nevermind that we're dealing with completely different archecuter designs.

      --
      I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
  3. Re:soooo by Jason+Earl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There has been little Be desktop development By Be Inc. but there has been a fair bit in the way of application and driver development by the exceptionally talented community of Be enthusiasts. (Their like Linux enthusasts but without the foaming at the mouth)

    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.

  4. Re:Awesome! by Jeffrey+Baker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't understand your statements about Unix device drivers. A driver for BeOS is completely unlike a driver for any other operating system.

  5. hidden agenda by Pivot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.