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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.
Interesting, offtopic story: In New York City, advertisments with built-in IR download units have started to appear. You pull out your PDA, point it at the side of the booth, and get a tiny program that has something to do with the ad or NYC (well, ideally, it didn't work for me the one time I tried it). Imagine, in your example, looking for a sushi restaurant, going up to an ad for the Zagat survey, downloading a listing of all restaurants in a 10-block radius, and doing a search for "sushi". This might actually work...
I saw this one coming a mile off. No matter what kind of Moore's law breaking processors Aki and the Deep Eyes Squad might have been using in the future, there is no way the current Palm OS could have ever scaled up to such a nice holographic GUI without some serious help.
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
"acquiring the assets and intellectual property of software "
That means that they are not buying the company, just IP and assets. That means that Palm will not be accepting liabilities, like support contracts, employment agreements, etc.
In scenarios like this, victim company is quickly closed and some employees are fired and some are given options to join new company.
This is not such a good deal as ouright purchase. I hope I am wrong.
Only if it is a Palm Tree.
As for Palm, well they've been in the market for a new kernel for a while now, and BeIA being very slick is perfect for them. Its established (technically, not commercially) and deals exceptionally well with real time media and networking - the kind of things Palm want to build upon for appeal.
The real question is where does that live the desktop OS that showed som much promise? As expected of a slashdot reader, I';ve got to say 'I hope it going to be made open source/GPL/Free/wibbleware' or similar words. Well, who knows... I just hope it doesnt vanish away... Press release here.
How pissed off do you think they'll be when they find out they paid millions for 127.0.0.1?
Apache is a good example of an Open Source product that has totally eclipsed the original. Who uses NCSA's webserver any more?
The PHP scripting language is another good example.
I woudn't be at all surprised if XFree86 begins to put the commercial X distros out of business, either.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Like Interem CEO Steve Jobs, right?
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." :)
I'm not an 'Open source everything!' zealot, but there's three letters anyone here really ought to remember in reply to that comment.
B, S and D. They ripped out the bits they couldn't open, then released the rest. Meanwhile, hackers spend time building replacements that can stay there.
Why not with BeOS? They may have sound business reasons for not wanting to (which they're allowed to), but there is a technical precedent for that sort of move.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
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.
Good Lord! This has to the THE worst 'E-' name to date. EVIL-la. 'Who are the ad wizards who came up with THIS one?'
m00.
The Palm OS road plan, as far as I understand it (and I have no inside contacts whatsoever) is for Palm OS 5.0 to be far more multimedia-capable and powerful in general than preceding Palm OSs were. In addition, Palm OS 5.0 will run on new ARM-based hardware, giving it lots more processing power while retaining Palm's superior battery life. Existing Palm software will probably be run under emulation.
I can certainly see the Be folks helping out in the multimedia arena. I wonder if they'll do any work on the user interface side? I kinda hope not, since I like the simplicity of Palm OS.
Wow. Talk about unexpected. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Apple.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Well, Palm might licence it out to companies doing web pads. I doubt Palm themselves are about to try and go into the web pad market: they have too much competition in their base market to divide their focus.
Open sourcing BeOS might be nice, too. I bet their kernel has lots of goodness that could go into, say, Linux.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
When you think about it... Palm OS looks more like BeOS than any other OS out there. For example... that tab in the upper left corner.
BeOS is not based on XINU (yea, I've heard that rumor too). XINU is an x86 OS that doesn't run in protected mode. BeOS is a microkernel that started on the AT&T Hobbit. Totally different beasts.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How did JLG do developers wrong?
D
Well, this is the future how I'd like to see it:
Palm takes BeIA in order to compete with the PocketPC/WindowsCE platform and possibly licence BeOS for devices like Edirol and Tascam make them or let Sony build HARP-devices. BeOS will remain as the development platform for BeIA, I think it ain't that easy to migrate the complete development environment to Win2k. Palm will make BeOS available for free just like you can get the PalmOS development tools for free now. In order to have broad acceptance for that development platform, Palm will be forced to keep BeOS up to date with support for the latest hardware, like Kyro or PIV.
Let's just hope the best
Doubtless Palm was after not the desktop BeOS, but the BeIA internet appliance operating system. BeIA has, to date, only been sold to Sony for the eVilla gizmo, but that probably won't earn Sony much money. But if Palm can combine BeIA with their own PalmOS, they could really give PocketPC a run for the market.
Palm's market share is falling like a stone.
Palm's stock price is falling like a stone.
You'd hope that someone that'll be in business in 3 years would have bought Be. Like Sony or Apple or IBM. But at the rate that Palm is tanking, I doubt they will be in business by 2004.
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
I nearly LOL'ed, myself... product placement is getting sneakier every year.
Yeah, but if the new market is a bust (and I have yet to see any web pad sell except in the clearance bin), and going there makes you less able to compete in your base market, you're dead too.
If Palm wanted a new market to go after, they should try to break into TI's graphing calculator for high schoolers market. All it would take is one app.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
So does this mean that we get SMP palms with little LED bargraphs on each side of the display for each CPU?
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
And by the way, I'm actually an avid Palm supporter. I'm just wondering what kind of a dent it makes in the industry when a financially-strapped company buys another.
It was then re-purposed as a Windows alternative, aimed (again) at multimedia content developers. Who stayed with the Mac, for reasons noted above.
The only other people who might want Be were the ones who wanted an alternative to both Windows and the Mac. We went to Linux, because it had both freedoms, and more apps.
Best Slashdot Co
enjoy here
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
The x86 port and then BeIA were simply last ditch efforts to reposition Be in an entirely different market than it was designed for.
IMO, the only thing that could have kept Be viable was to have dumped the OS and to have kept the hardware. Commodity priced PowerPC boxes running LinuxPPC could have made Be a household name in the workstation market.
Well now that I've touched streaming video, I'll never go back to ASCII Video/Static low quality, low color images again... Bring it on full color full movie... :)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
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 :)
11 million in Palm stock, huh? What's that, like 5.8E21 shares at this point?
Juiced? Or Not?
Palm could use the B in Be in rename their flagship product 'the Balm' and they could use such trendy phrases as: 'it's the balm of your digital world' 'balm is the beat-all of all your needs' 'with a palm and balm the uses are endless!' everyone knows that they've just overused the word Palm and now it's common everyday blah.. it doesn't cull out a "what is that" anymore.
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.
Why... make the Disney Operating System of course! ohhh the humanity!
Not really. Although BeOS is not based on Unix despite other claims, the drivers work somehow similar. A Be engineer once stated on the dev mailing list that it'd be possible to port XFree86 drivers in a couple of hours. As for sound and network drivers, just like in Unix they are mapped to device files with regular open(), read(), write() etc functions.
what is intresting is the differant hardware that Be has had to run on
AT&T hobbit processor - starting blocks
Power -- IBM 32 bit chip
PowerPC -- IBM 32/64 bit chip
dragonball -- MOT trying to beat ARM
intel 586 -- plain intel arch when it all seemed to be going fast
Geode -- NatSemi trying to get MOT market
and now
ARM 5TE -- the guys from cambridge who didnt have any money (they do now)
what is intresting about this is what would you compile with,
for the hobbit it would be their own compiler
then power again a custom or gcc
then PowerPC either relie on Power stuff or use IBM compiler
IA use GCC
Geode as well dragonball use GCC or custom
ARM will Proberly use GCC or custom proberly greenhills Multi2000
the point is to go through all this would mean alot of it will be standards with little or no complex features used
makes porting to ARM a breaze
PalmOS compatability going to ARM is going to be an emulation job anyway
why not emulate all of existing API + processor and start with something new ?
what do you think ?
regards
john jones
I wonder if Palm wants to use the Be kernel for the next generation of ARM-based devices. Note that PalmOS already runs on top of a different kernel (AMX, I think), licensed from another company.
-Karl
The Register has the story at www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/21080.html. Palm will pay $11 million in stock. Be's shareholders still have to approve the deal.
Details, man!
What kinds? Who? Where?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
...but only because they've overextended themselves. (In contrast, Microsoft is years away from overextending themselves because they have so many other ways to provide income.) However, the Palm name is still well-recognized and appreciated. Think of all the apps available for the PalmOS. Think of how "PalmPilot" is still a casual name for any handheld computer, despite the fact that Palm hasn't made any "Pilots" for a couple of years. Now imagine a full-color, fully-interactive OS for a color handheld or web tablet with the Palm name branding it. Be's name couldn't make that sell. Palm's name could. Microsoft could sell it better, of course, but (TabletPCs notwithstanding) they're still not quite there yet. And neither Sony nor Apple nor IBM is really in the handheld/portable market, while Palm has been about nothing but. If anyone can make the BeIA a success now, it'd be Palm. (Whether they will or not is open to speculation.)
Hmm... I left out the phrase "on phone booths" from my first sentence :\
If one failing company buys out another failing company, does it make a sound? :)
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.
Right now the market is in horrible shape. PC OEMS are nothing more than Windows distributors and Apple has a near monolopy on not being Microsoft. It would be nice to get some fresh blood in the industry.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Secondly, Palm doesn't defecate on developers. Be did, despite JLG's comments. Let's hope this turns out better for us developers.
Thirdly, Be does have existing BeIA contracts, and it's possible that Palm would consider continuing to market BeIA to IA developers as a means of bringing in more money (but with the Palm name attached). What is the development platform for BeIA? Why, it's BeOS. They either need to port their development platform over to another OS (unlikely) or continue BeOS at least for developers of that.
Lastly, this isn't a buyout. Palm bought Be's *assets*. Be as a company is still around, and a note in their press release said they retain the right to bring suits, *including under antitrust law*. You can all speculate as to the target, esp. considering what they did with Compaq.
At least some of us knew this all along, but were weighing more than one variable. Long run, I'll place my bets on an open source system like Linux trumping everything else, but this isn't so much the case in the short term.
I hate to have to admit it, but open source has a proven ability to not be able to come up with particularly innovative software. The strength of OS isn't so much in coming up with new things as it is in seeing what others have done well and coming up with a better implementation of the best parts of the same idea: compare anything from the enhanced GNU versions of all the old system utilities up through Linux itself [unix++], the Gimp [photoshop++, or getting there anyway], Gnutella [Napster++], and the recent efforts to clone .NET [c#++]. I have much more faith in the long term success of these efforts than in their proprietary counterparts, but each of them is going to be forever seen as the twinned complement to an earlier, closed source product. I've seen no significant OS project that really bucks this trend, though I welcome anyone to come up with a good counterexample that proves me wrong.
BeOS fit that pattern too. It was closed, and that did mean always having the risk that it wouldn't survive, but it also meant that the company behind it would be trying some truly inventive things. Filesystem as relational database! Memory protection! TCP/IP almost to the core, with an internal client/server structure that hypothetically should have made distributed computing trivial. Pervasive multithreading, preemptive scheduling, yadda yadda yadda, *and* a pretty little interface that drew on the best of what can be found in Macintosh, Windows, and X.
There were a few niggling little holes -- hardware support was always spotty, major updates like OpenGL & BONE networking have been on hold for far too long now, etc -- and this is indeed the drawback of a small company trying to do so much all by itself. You're right -- the possibility that the company would cease to exist & bring the OS down with it was always a threat, and indeed maybe that's what we're seeing here.
But damn it was worth it. Linux beats BeOS for stability, hardware support, etc, but it's nowhere near as slick as a desktop system, even if BeOS is still basically an incomplete product. I was willing to put up with a few glitches and the threat of obsolescence for the chance to work with an operating system this nice.
Nothing else in the proprietary or free software worlds has yet to bring together so many clever ideas into one package, though I'm sure that, like Amiga & NeXT, these ideas will end up being diffused into the rest of the operating systems world over the next decade or so. Running BeOS is like using that system of the future now, without having to wait for the [hopefully inevitable] superior but derivative free software clone to follow in a few years.
Telling a BeOS fan that these sorts of dangers of implosion exist is a bit like telling an early aviation or NASA engineer that there are dangers in their fields. You might be right, but we don't care -- you're going to have to do better than that to dissuade us... :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I don't understand your statements about Unix device drivers. A driver for BeOS is completely unlike a driver for any other operating system.
I based my XINU comment on my well-worn copy of the BeOS Bible.
In an interview with one of the BeOS developers, he stated that one of the other guys (Be employee #3 or so) "... cracked open the XINU book" and began coding.
I didn't mean to imply that BeOS was derived from XINU, only inspired by it.
Good to see that someone out there knows what XINU is, most people just give me a blank stare.
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.
--
C-YA
Jon
This is a great move for Palm. It will be trivial to support current PalmOS applications running on a StrongArm version of the BeOS.
The BeOS should scale downward nicely to StrongArm-based Palm devices and it's one of the few operating systems in the world that truly understands the power of pervasive threading. (Linux, Windows, and MacOS X threads are a joke compared to the BeOS)
If Palm had any balls, they would open source the BeOS for use on desktop-class machines just to piss off Microsoft. I'm sure a lot of users would like to run the same operating system on their handhelds as their desktops, especially as their handhelds become more powerful.
The only thing Palm really needs now is some good handwriting recognition software. They really need to buy Calligrapher in order to make their handhelds useful to a larger number of people.
ObBeSlap: anyone notice that the 'Product' button on the Be site navbar doesn't do anything?
How will this affect slashdot's icons? Can you imagine the merging of the BE and Palm Icons into one? :)
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
So they bought an OS and development tools for whatever Palm turns itself into. OK Dragonball is dead long live ARM. We all thought this would free up Palm the hardware company to use SymbianOS which is a whole shitload better for wireless apps than PalmOS. That left Palm the software company to errrrr.... pound sand. They don't own Symbian and shortly no one NO ONE will want a Dragonball OS unless it' to simply suck royalties from Sony, Handspring and Handera/TRG. So they had to go after a general purpose OS they could use to differentiate themselves. Why not Lunix or BFD you ask? Well if it was so easy someone would have had more than a funky demo by now. Sure the LinuxDA distro is sort of maybe not quite here but as far as development tools? Shucks Mabel, it looks like yer gonna hafta roll yer own!!!!!!!! So Be makes sense: you get the base of an OS you get tools and you get some experience writing apps. Sounds like a better business model than the one they had. I wonder if they can execute on that?
Lost cause? The only remaining hope is that Palm does something with the BeOS code (like Open Source it!), cuz god knows BeIA has been BeOS's worst enemy...
Honestly, I can't think of a single good thing that could come out of this. Can you?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Be has been marketing itself to the internet appliance market for sometime now. Perhaps Palm feels it needs to upgrade it's user interface to keep up with WINCE. Not to start a war, but the palm interface is crude and not very attractive. I can't figure out why it has taken them so long to support colors on the interface.
In other words, Be as a desktop OS is DEAD
Holy shit! Hide the women, children, and copies of BeOS 5 on your hard drive, because apparantly JLG will be comin' round to delete them!
(The copies of BeOS, not your women and children.)
(He might rape your women, though. He's French, you know.)
"And like that
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.
When I submitted the news this morning, Be stock was at 46, now it is at 19, well...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
I turned off Score +1 and turned on anonymity, and the settings seem to have gotten stuck! This post is to test the phenomenon. My apologies for the OT-ness to all concerned.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
This Be thing is not going to be for PalmOS5, but of PalmOS6. First, the kernel and multimedia API's need to be ported to the ARM, and then the Palm OS 5 interface and API needs to be able to run on top of this.
Expect 400MHz+ XScale Palm PDA's running BePalmOS6 within 2 years. I hope.
Okay okay, Enough about the technology being exchanged, From the sounds of the article, we as stock holders will get screwed? If Be is only selling its technology, whats to happen to the stock? As owner of both beos and palm stock, I am way confused here. Could someone with knowledge about such things please post?
Note that this deal is going for something like NEGATIVE 50% premium over market price (stock fell 50%). Also that Be had something like 5 million in cash (as of last quarter). So the Be management/owner must have been really pessimistic. Palm bought it really cheap.
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.