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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.

1 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Why??? by nicodaemos · · Score: 1, Redundant

    I'm struggling to figure out why Palm would do this acquisition. I mean sure they pick up some world class software developers who could surely help them in working with the PalmOS - but what are they going to do with the BeOS?

    Another poster suggested that they port BeOS to the Palm color. I'm sure it's feasible - says my brain even though it can barely spell BeOS - but it wouldn't really shine in the Palm. The BeOS is a true pervasively multi-threaded OS. AFAIK, it was built for heavy multimedia applications that involve a lot of disk I/O -- something you rarely see in a Palm device.

    Now if Palm were going to make a play to expand the BeOS product line for the desktop -- ie. try to compete headon with Micro$oft, Linux, BSD, etc. that would be interesting! It's too bad that AOL/Time Warner wasn't the one doing the acquisition - they'd have much deeper pockets to actually make the desktop OS competition interesting.

    Sex, Cars or Computers? or Should We Be Together? - you decide