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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
11 million in Palm stock, huh? What's that, like 5.8E21 shares at this point?
Juiced? Or Not?
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.
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
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.
No. Be asked for about $250 million. Apple chose instead to purchase NeXT for some $400 million. (And then made a snarky comment to the press along the lines of, "We went with Plan A instead of Plan Be.")
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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.
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
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.