Slashdot Mirror
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.
Perhaps the reason Palm has lagged behind their competitors for a while is because they're directing their efforts toward The Next Big Thing — perhaps the BeOS will be running on our palmtops after all. It's a gorgeous, elegant, and terribly resource-efficient OS; given sufficient horsepower (from an ARM processor, for example), it might be quite impressive at 320x320 resolutions.
Anyone out there with behind-the-scenes knowledge willing to provide some insight?
...BeOS is dead. What on earth would Palm want to continue it for? There are pretty much no users and they add no value to Palm's core business. Palm wanted the assets: developer expertise, a useful codebase, a bunch of good ideas (and likely patents).
You can also forget about them open-sourcing the codebase - it's one of the assets they just bought. Presumably they see some kind of competitive advantage in having it (I'm not sure I do) - they're unlikely to give that away now.
Exactly, except we used to say "gone the way of the Commododo.". :-)
Oh, how I would like to get my hands on Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould and slowly wring the last ounce of life out of their greedy bodies... But I digress.
Money for nothing, pix for free
in addition to the codebase, patents, etc., palm will be able to sue microsoft on beos' behalf, for the unlawful licensing tactics that kept beos off the desktop... microsoft's o.e.m. licenses prohibited dual-booting, which was definitely a contributing factor to beos' demise (one of the few concessions that the d.o.j. "won" in the recent settlement was a prohibition on those types of licensing agreements)
given that microsoft is now a proven monopolist, and treble damages apply, palm stands to make considerably more money from microsoft than they spent for be
i thought, therefore i was...
The plan of BeUnited is more or less to license BeOS, release a new version, and use the sales profit to pay for the license. The OS would then be improved with the help of NDAed enthusiasts and possibly some pros. An open source release is not planned.
As much as I'd like this plan to succeed, I consider it purely wishful thinking:
1. No money.
BeUnited doesn't have a sponsor (I asked), and in the current situation I think it's unlikely that they'll get a high enough credit.
2. No product
While it's true that BeInc has been doing work on a new network stack (BONE) and a nice OpenGL implementation, this stuff is still in late beta. Other parts like Java and Opera4 would have to be ported from BeIA.
3. The numbers aren't right.
Have a look at the 'Save BeOS' petition: Around 4000 entries. So how many versions could you sell? For what price? What's your margin? Even if you would get a credit and if you wouldn't need to do dev work: You wouldn't make enough money to make Palm an attractive offer.
Sad but true.
Now if Apple bought Palm, Steve would have an awesome product-development team from Be, people that know how to optimize PPC media streams and squeeze incredible media through apple hardware.
Right now Apple's core market won't jump to OS X because it's not as good at multimedia (IMO) as the cooperative-multitasking and close-to-hardware Classic Mac OS. This would be just what the doctor ordered for Apple.
I think Palm is prettying themselves up for a buyout.
I would be VERY pleased if such things happened.
I'd pay to see Jobs and Gasse competing for "most warped psyche" on Apple campus!
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I hate to say this, but the way things are going, Microsoft will win the PDA war.
Most users out there like the safety (or feel good) that a familiar environment provides. Most will buy a PDA not because it has the best OS, but because the migration from their PC to the PDA is not difficult.... ie it is still fairly intuitive.
Palm forking and introducing another OS would just muddy the waters, and at best I think would win market share from the other minor OSes, instead of Microsoft.
Incorporate some the good bits of BeOS into PalmOS if you must, but please do not introduce yet another PDA OS.
For what it's worth, I think Palm should bequeth BeOS to the GNU/Linux crew, and slowly migrate PalmOS to Linux. The result would be more critical mass, and a concerted and coordinated challenge to Windows on the desktop, on the servers, and on the PDA.
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
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!
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?
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly, BeOS had the fastest, most elegant GUI I'd ever seen. I just think they were optimistic about their chances against Microsoft.
What BeOS had was amazing performance in the low-latency area of computing, namely audio and video.There is a huge market for audio and video processing. People in that sector goes with what runs best, they're even running MacOS 9 (gasp!), because Cubase and other applications just plain works better under MacOS compared to Windows. Some are still running Atari!
Be had their chance when Steinberg announced a port of Nuendo, their successor to Cubase, to BeOS. At that point, the entire music business was raving, "No more suffering from Wndows/MacOS!!"
Guess what happened? Be made the decision to drop BeOS personal edition, and instead pursue the BeOS Internet Appliance(!?!). This failed in a spectacular way, with Sony delivering the only shipping units with BeIA. Sony have since discontinued that product.
They had their chance, a niche OS that would dominate a small percentage of the market, but blew it big time.
Mikael
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
However,
1) Since OSX is based on Mach, it had a 30-yr strong Unix heritage, plus a GUI interface more enticing than BeOS.
2) BeIA is the biggest waste on earth : 64-bit journalling file system and preemptive multitasking for a wireless webpad??!! If done correctly, BeIA might be as powerful as Linux or FreeBSD on a workstation or a small server!
3) Like many ironic stories out there, products that are "successful" are usually those promoted by marketing genuises, not those that have technical excellence. Thus why people go WindowsME/XP or Pentium4....Be Inc. just didn't have enough marketing to convey the message that it's a superior alternative to MacOS (or to an extent, Windows).
Imagine a Titanium PowerBook G4 tri-booting BeOS, MacOS X, and LinuxPPC! Damn I want one of those babies!