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Be Shareholders Approve Sale to Palm
moooooooo writes: "Well it's official. Be shareholders have approved the sale of Be Assets to Palm.
Hopefully Palm will announce something about either a new BeOS version or licensing the source to the BeUnited crew."
Unfortunately it can't be open-sourced because if the amount of licensed code in it that would be nigh-on impossible to strip out. However, there are some projects underway such as OpenBeOS to reproduce the API open source.
No reason whatsoever, and that's a sad thing.
You have no idea what's been lost here. Yes, BeOS had plenty of warts and rough edges that are the hallmark of any desktop system that doesn't have millions of users to help smooth them over (through sheer erosion if nothing else). But there's lots of stuff inside BeOS that was done very right, and now that's lost forever to desktop users.
BeOS did seamless symmetric multi-processing from day one. Yes, Linux does it, too, but never (that I have seen) out of the box. You have to recompile the kernel, something "normal" users don't have a taste for. Further, the pervasive multithreading took full advantage of however many CPUs you had in the machine (it even ran, unmodified, on a prototype 8-way Xeon machine).
BeOS is multi-platform. Originally developed for the AT&T Hobbit processor, BeOS was ported to the PowerPC (which was maintained for as long as was practicable) and Intel processors. Now that Palm is in the picture, BeOS is being ported to the StrongARM.
If there was a BeOS driver for your sound card, it just worked. No recompiling the kernel, no reading highly technical HOWTO files that even experienced programmers have trouble interpreting to work out which compile switches to set, no editing /etc/modules.conf in Mysterious Ways to load the driver with the correct parameters, and definitely no futzing with PNP tools to interrogate and configure older cards.
If the power died, the 64-bit journalled filesystem would lose no data. Just reboot and you're good to go. Linux is only just now getting this with ReiserFS and SGI's port of XFS.
But beyond what was available in the last public release of BeOS (v5.0.3) was what was under development in the EXP tree: a "theme-able" desktop GUI, a completely new kernel-based networking stack that rivalled the speed of Linux and *BSD, further refinement of the audio services, and a complete re-write of the OpenGL system to support hardware acceleration (the Voodoo and ATI Radeon drivers were in excellent shape, and the Intel 810 driver was making good progress (until I ran into that $(EXPLETIVE) opaque chip lockup that I failed to track down)).
Palm has expressed firm disinterest in pursuing any of this. So Gates gets another notch in his belt, and you have one less option for your desktop machine. This, I contend, is not a good thing.
I can't imagine how Jean-Louis Gassée feels right now.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
IMHO, Palm will stop the development of BeOS.
There's maybe a chance that one day, the OpenBeOS project succeeds.
OpenBeOS is an opensource project which wants to recreate the BeOS.
I don't believe it's possible. It seems to be a too difficult work but the people behind this project looks serious. So good luck to OpenBEOS!
Their main reason for buying Be wasn't its software, it was its engineers - Palm has been going through a rough patch with PalmOS, and in fact laid off most of its software developers. This wasn't an economic move, it was a political and technical move. A few months later they go ahead and buy out Be, and the Be engineers get reassigned to Palm projects.
2DUP * ;
The About-Box of BeOS hints at some of the licensed code:
RSA encryption for Net+
(Hasn't the RSA license changed anyway?)
Real Player and maybe codecs
(Simply leave them out)
USB drivers from Intel
Tough - but you can live without them
Optimized graphics routines from Intel
The biggest problem. Graphics card drivers
and maybe OpenGL seem to depend on it.
On the other hand, BeOS 4.5 seems to have
worked without that code. And maybe it's
encapsulated in the libbitflinger.
Well - if you know what you're doing, it
should not be too hard to get the code out.
But who should do it?
I can give you the numbers anyway:
Currently it's $0.095 per share.
At the IPO it was $6 per share. The highest
price has been around $40 per share when
there were speculations about RedHat buying
BeInc.