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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.

2 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. 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.