It's The End Of The Be As We Know It

JRAC writes "Be Inc. has replaced their web site's entire contents with information on the sale of Be to Palm. Stock holders can find all relevant info on the Stock Information page. BeOS 5 Personal Edition is no longer available from the site. Looks like it's time to hit the mirrors. Try ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/beos for files. " The official sale was approved just over a month ago.

Comments

This is exactly why we need Free software.

[phaze3000]

All the thousands of hours that have been poured into this product are now wasted.

If only Be had released the source under the GPL prior to going under, BeOS could have continued and evovled. As it is it's something of a Neanderthal - an evolutionary dead end.

Re:This is exactly why we need Free software.

[Shade, The]

Neanderthal - very apt, considering the most likely reason for their extinction was their lack of ability to adapt.

Re:This is exactly why we need Free software.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is exactly the last thing Be would/should have done!

If they had GPL'd their code then they would most likely have declared bankruptcy instead of selling their IP and assets to Palm.

Re:This is exactly why we need Free software.

[tswinzig]

If only Be had released the source under the GPL prior to going under

Ummm, Be sold BeOS to Palm to gain $11,000,000, to pay off creditors and try to give some money back to the shareholders that poured a shitload of money into BEOS (for example, ME).

On top of that, for the upteenth million time, BeOS could NOT have been open-sourced, because it contained a lot of code that was not Be's to give away. Obviously they did not feel putting a ton of engineers on the task of preparing the source code to be given away.

Re:This is exactly why we need Free software.

[Watts Martin]

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect the source code to BeOS was a major component of what was in fact sold to Palm. I know the general feeling is that Palm was essentially buying the development team, but they're also buying pieces of an operating system that can be reused in a later effort.

From the standpoint of a user or engineer, I think you're absolutely correct. From the standpoint of a group (i.e., Be's board of directors) trying to sell that code as an asset, though, making it open would have been suicidal.

There'd also have been significant technical and legal hurdles in opening it: code licensed from other companies would have had to have been removed, replacement free code would have had to have been located and integrated into the source, the new "100% free" code would have had to have undergone unit testing. Then the source would have had to have been cleaned up, the existing documentation would have to have been corrected, completed and more than likely extended with notes on the actual code--otherwise very few people who hadn't worked on it would have the time to parse through it. None of that is insurmountable, but it'd have required a lot of resources assigned to the project, and Be just didn't have many resources available. The only way for that to have happened, practically speaking, would have been for their buyer to agree to fund opening the code--which of course brings us back to the "code as asset" problem described above.

Re:This is exactly why we need Free software.

[be-fan]

The fact that BeOS wasn't open source is what ultimately killed yet. OSS code is hard to kill. Hell, HURD is still plodding along after all these years! (Put down the pitchforks, that was a joke!) BeOS was stagnated. Be didn't have the money to improve it (and yes, there are tons of things that could have been improved) and nobody had access to the source so they could. If it was open source, at least the OpenBeOS BlueOS guys could have put their efforts into improving BeOS, rather than replicating work that had been done long before. And the "OSS leads to fragmentation" idea is bullshit. Just take a look at FreeBSD! Even Linux (the kernel) is rather tightly unified, given the vast number of sources working on it (kernel devs, SGI, IBM, RedHat, Mandrake, etc).

Re:This is exactly why we need Free software.

[Sloppy]

While you give good reasons why BeOS couldn't be freed, you don't really refute his point: that if it had been freed, the destruction of the platform could have been avoided.

What we have here is a clear case of freeing it not really being a big advantage to BeOS' owner, but would have been a huge advantage to BeOS users and 3rd party developers. ..Which goes back to the tired old point that Free Software licenses are a very valuable feature that users should look for in the software they use. Maybe that's why my client box gets booted into Linux all the time, while my BeOS 4.5 partition just rots. Linux developers know that they are safe from the platform ever going away, which has resulted in an abundance of software.

Black armband

[Therlin]

Is it me or is the black armband at the top of the logo new?

Re:Black armband

[Oily Tuna]

Yes, the old logo is here

AAARGH!

[The Great Wakka]

BeOS... sigh... Such a great OS. Maybe Palm will GPL it, or the OpenBeOS (no URL, sorry: http://openbeos.sourceforge.net, i think) people will finish their clone. But the kernel... maybe it will live on. Maybe. New Apps will be released, but it will eventually fall into an Amiga-Style situation, except that Amiga is still around. Cross your fingers, and hope for a release of all the source code!

Finally, an answer to the question...

[Dicky]

To Be, or not to Be? That is the question.

And the answer, unfortunately, is not to Be. I don't know much about the company, but I played with the OS, and it was pretty nice. I liked the GUI enough that my Afterstep desktop is clearly BeOS-inspired...

Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[TellarHK]

As operating systems have come and gone, one trend has been impossible to avoid. Driver support is next to nonexistent for anything other than Windows, and increasingly Linux on the x86 platform. This doesn't have anything to do with the ethos of open source, nor does it have anything to do with the quality of the operating system. BeOS absolutely kicked ass, it was an incredible attempt at exactly what the industry needs - a clean OS designed for today's desktop needs.

Unfortunately, this isn't what hardware manufacturers want to support. They want to support Windows and maybe Linux. From a conspiratorial standpoint, you could always think about it as the hardware manufacturers simply sticking to Windows because the power curve keeps increasing so often, new parts are always in vogue. From a more realistic standpoint, it's likely because the manufacturers are broke due to economic conditions, or simply too inexperienced to handle multiplatform development. Can open source volunteers make good drivers? Sure, we've seen this with xfree86, but look at what's happened to X. It's huge, considerably bloated, and with the exception of a very few window managers, ugly and unwieldy.

The Be kernel and design methodology were excellent, with few major flaws. The file system design was incredible and should be the first thing remembered if anyone does try and develop another operating system, or add support for it to Linux. Unfortunately, I just don't see evidence that the open source community can come together to create the kind of experience we're starting to see from Mac OS X, in regards to the Be effort. You need hardware, you need vendor support, and you need -rapid- development to get momentum going.

OSX's major flaw so far has been performance, because the BSD/Mach codebase it's built on it simply unwieldy without further refinement. Too much RAM is sucked up by the GUI, which at least manages to be the most functionally attractive one out there. It does what it needs to do, looks good doing it, and actually does mange to innovate, something that hasn't honestly been done since the original MacOS. Say what you will, but the windowing paradigm hasn't evolved much until transparencies became a feature of a commercially successful OS. Apple was able to make this leap by having control over the drivers, and the operating system. As a ten percent underdog, that's not the bad kind of monopoly. Particularly as Apple increasingly, yet slowly, warms up to open source.

Do I support work on OpenBe and like projects? Sure. Do I expect they'll change the world? Not at all. I -wish- they could, but if a system with as many developers as Linux still fails to impress me as a desktop solution due to clunkiness and the interface nightmare that is X11, I just don't think open source will be able to develop an interface that'll compete for user friendliness.

Will I use Linux and X11? Yes, of course. But I'm not the average home user, and that's where the battle for vendor support for an OS lies. I hope someday open source will come around and realize this.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[Anonymous Coward]

>Too much RAM is sucked up by the GUI

There is an option to turn on window memory compression. It was left disabled in the release because of concern that it may be the cause of a kernel panic (which was later traced to another cause) but could be enabled manually and should be enabled by default in the next release. Some (limited) info:

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/6491
I can't remember which site I was on that had the good discussion.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[TellarHK]

I'll summarize my point for the hint impaired. It's becoming increasingly clear, and yes, repeatedly stated, that open source is stalled at any attempt to actually change the world that the desktop user sees. It's also becoming increasingly clear that the only honest-to-gods challenge to Windows desktops is going to be as it always was, Apple.

The Windows monopoly has -won-. Buisnesses need Office, suits buy what they know about regardless of quality, when it comes to computers. You can argue until you're blue in the face that Linux is a more stable, securable, and cheaper alternative but the question will -always- be asked.

"Who do we call if something goes horribly, drastically wrong? And by the way, where's Office for it?"

Maybe they can call IBM, who knows. But as to Office, Microsoft has essentially shut open source completely out. But they've made one possible mistake, and created possibly the best Word and Excel solution on a non-Microsoft operating system. THIS more than anything else is what open source developers who truly want to change the world should look at, the fact that Apple's finally rising to the challenge, with the -support- of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit.

If you want to change the world, make Mac OS X and the Darwin/x86 core better. Let Apple handle the GUI, let Apple design the hardware. Yes, it may cost 10-20% more for the hardware, but it's a small price to pay for the closest thing to a free chance at actually getting a truly kick-ass OS into the hands of the masses.

Instead of considering Apple a closed-source evil, look at them as a company that knows how to do three things well. They know how to design killer hardware, they know how to create a user interface that doesn't suck, and they know how to -survive-. You don't get bitch-slapped in the marketplace by Microsoft for nearly two decades and remain in business by living on your stock inflation alone.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[Fnkmaster]

I do believe the Open Source community is CAPABLE of the feat you describe. I think the biggest weakness of the Open Source and Free Software communities is a lack of business understanding. For example - if you want to come up with something that can take a significant desktop market share (and thereby bootstrap itself to get sufficient application support) you need to start by looking at the hardware manufacturers. This is the first "bootstrapping" problem of developing OS marketshare - supporting the plethora of x86 devices out there, graphics, sound, USB mice, etc. Be did an okay job at this but it was always lagging behind Linux and Windows (obviously). Linux has good device support, and therefore has attracted enough Open Source and commercial app developers to give it sufficient useful apps to be at least minimally functional on the desktop. Of course, as you point out rightfully the desktop capabilities of Linux/X windows are just not sufficiently modern, no matter how nice the toolkit is. Different widget sets, fragmented app appearance and feel, slow redraws (sorry, but look at an app like Mozilla in Windows and X on the same machine and you can't tell me it redraws, responds to user interaction, etc. anywhere near as fast on X).

What's the solution? Well, entice the hardware manufacturers or make their life easier. For example, make something that can work with X windows drivers (X Acceleration Architecture) or whatever. That way manufacturer support is strengthened for a standard rather than weakened. Trying to come in and force manufacturers to start from scratch is just going to fragment their modest support for the Linux platform and make them think the Open Source community is too much work to support.

X11 is wrong. It needs to go away. But the alternative needs to be something that can get developer and hardcore community support united behind it. That community support is key to getting apps, which in the end make the win in the desktop market. Users and apps are a chicken and egg problem, but that's the power of Open Source - you don't need millions of dollars to entice app developers with incentives and marketing blitz to get some users. You just need to get the developers and "hardcore" community members to come your way, and the rest will (eventually) follow. And the developers just need a complete set of tools that are convincing enough and will show potential to fulfill their own needs and desires and get a lot of other users using their apps at the same time. Then if you can convince companies that it will be able to reach a broader user base, they will start chugging out commercial apps - this is where Linux broke down, because it just doesn't have the usability to go that next step, limiting it to the power users and developers even now, and attracting modest commercial interest, but not the "snowball" effect something needs to be perceived as a full-fledged equal of Windows.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[aussersterne]

X isn't bloated, it's quite lean and can even run quickly on embedded devices. It's extensible enough to support everything that's occurred so far (touchscreen input, 2D and 3D acceleration, full-motion video, etc.) quite well and without losing backward compatibility with existing applications.

On another note, I am firmly convinced that the reason OSX is slow is Mach. Experience in my department has established that throughput on a loaded server with a microkernel-based OS (MkLinux with a Debian binary set) is a good 30-50% slower than with a non-microkernel OS (monolithic Linux kernel with the *same* binary set). That is not a performance loss to sneeze at, no matter how great microkernels are.

I personally think the reason Linux is the top competitor to Windows is simple: it's a Unix-like operating system and after 30+ years, no better paradigm for rapidly-deployable general-purpose computing (i.e. everything from office tasks to embedded systems to network serving) than Unix+X has yet been seen, regardless of BeOS, OS/2, Amiga Workbench, ad infinitum.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[zulux]

The Windows monopoly has -won-. Buisnesses need Office,

Not my customers. For medium sized offies, a lot of my clinets are switching to FreeBSD for servers and OpenBSD for firewalls/email. Two of them (~25 seats) have switched to Linux on most of the desktops - we've been able to do this due to AbiWord and the fact that I do the GL/Invoing/JobCosting/etc database programming for them.

For small offices - Office, Quickbooks and Peer-To-Peer NetBios networking still is ok. Even some of them are starting to ask if thee are alternatived to the Microsoft Outlook/Windows bug of the week. Some have switched to Netscape 6.0 to get away fro Outlook/Outlook Express. Thinks are a changein' .

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[zulux]

Anything that isn't Microsoft is getting shuffled out to pasture.

Even if things stay the same - we're having an effect. Examples - Unix TCP/IP is now the default network protocall for all desktop computers: We use to have NetBUI,AppleTalk, Banyan Vines, Novell IPX. Windows is getting being force to be more reliable - and Mozilla is helping keep the WWW from being a Microsoft company town.

Keep in mind that Microsoft's stock has gone sideways for the last year and a half, and Windows XP is selling less in it's first month than Windows 98 did.

Also - A new user to Mandrake 8.1 could do everything they could possible need using OpenSource/GPL software.

The educational market has been locked up by Apple and Microsoft - but people learn Java and C++ in programming classes, not MS C# . Nobody even bothers with VB much in class anymore.

I think things are going ok, not great, but ok.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[NutscrapeSucks]

The Windows monopoly has -won-.

Hey -- The Windows monopoly "won" back in 1993 or so. I think JL Gasse should have been smart enough to figure that out.

It's too bad about BeOS, but trying to market themselves as a general purpose desktop OS (the exact same market segment as Windows) was really fucking stupid. Whatever advantage Be had in that space was elimated by Moore's Law back in 1996 or so.

It they would have stuck to a veritcal nitch as a "media OS" (or started the embedded strategy sooner), they might have had a chance to survive.

As for Apple as being a general solution for "the masses" -- Apple itself won't let it happen. As demand for their systems goes up, Apple will choose higher profits over a larger marketshare, and raise it's prices. It's a great system, but the marketing is all high-profit elitism aimed at a specific 5-10% sector.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[be-fan]

1) HFS doesn't have true attributes. It has two forks.
2) HFS sucks. Its more advanced than FAT32, true, but Giampalo was right when he called HFS the "oddball cousin" of the filesystem world.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[tswinzig]

On another note, I am firmly convinced that the reason OSX is slow is Mach. Experience in my department has established that throughput on a loaded server with a microkernel-based OS (MkLinux with a Debian binary set) is a good 30-50% slower than with a non-microkernel OS (monolithic Linux kernel with the *same* binary set). That is not a performance loss to sneeze at, no matter how great microkernels are.

Then how do you explain the great speed of BeOS?

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[Raven667]

What was being compared was MkLinux (ie. Mach/Linux) and Darwin (ie. Mach/BSD). They are both designed by Apple and both use Mach. Mach has been known to be a slow and crappy microkernel implementation, but that doesn't seem to have impacted it's popularity very much.

On the other hand, BeOS uses its own microkernel, designed from the ground up for speed. This would be similar to other microkernel based OS's like NT and QNX (IIRC). At least for BeOS and QNX, nobody complains about kernel speed.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[Forkenhoppen]

A 3D-capable desktop is infeasible, and I'll tell you why right now. (This is OT as high hell, but oh well..)

Depth perception. You look at your current desktop, and everything is using a "pieces of paper" paradigm. This is an easy to understand paradigm, and there's a reason; your brain can easily perceive and interpret it. Everything that you see can easily be transformed into a 2D image, which is how the brain processes everything it sees.

3D screws this up, because now you have to worry about depth as well; is something hiding under that pile? How big is it? Is it far away or close-up? This is hard to tell, from your brain's point of view, without further clues. To give these 3D depth cues, your brain needs a different image for each eye.

So fine, let's imagine that 3D display surfaces are ubiquitous, so we can rely on these depth queues. Now we have a new problem; visual distraction. Do an experiment for me. Sit down at your desk, and carefully place a piece of paper on the desk vertically in front of you. This is now the document you'll be working on. Now try and sit in such a way that you can see all of the paper, read it, be able to work on it, and still not be distracted by the depth of the desk around you, the wall in front of you, etc. (If you have your desk against a wall, this probably isn't too hard, because the wall isn't very far away; you'll have to pick a place with a far depth behind it.)

What you'll find is you're tending to lean in closer to the paper so you don't see as much of what's around you. This suggests that this is the best way to keep from being distracted in this manner.. but this is essentially the same as a maximized window, correct? So what added benefit does our 3D give us?

Now lets say you want to jump to another window quickly; how would you do this? Well, we'd like to take the visual hint from the Windows taskbar here, to create some sort of list of stuff opened. How would this be represented? What we want; all apps to be visible all the time (otherwise it's no better than the win 3.1 alt-tab screen) and a quick way of accessing them. ... Can you come up with anything that doesn't sound like the taskbars of the 2D desktop of today?

Now let's get back to the desktop paradigm. Simply put, there are two ways you could set this up; a room paradigm, where you move around and look at/interact with stuff, or a box/pit paradigm.

The room paradigm is nice, because you can make your desktop as big as you want and then wander around it. The downside, though, is that you've again increased the complexity, adding "travel time" to get from one place to another. Of course, one could always bookmark certain 3D locations, but I'd consider this to be a bit of a kludge; I shouldn't need to bookmark common locations in my desktop just to get work done.

The box/pit idea's a bit cleaner, in that it's a lot easier to understand for someone just getting started. You don't need to worry about moving around; you're staring into your monitor, and it's kind of like a pit that goes in from the screen. You can use a 3D pointing device to move around stuff inside the pit, and pull it to the front. The downside to this is that you're essentially .. well ... it's kind of reminiscient of your current desktop, don't you think?

The last big strike against a 3D desktop is the input device. The mouse is a great input device for moving around in 2D, but once we hit 3D, we have problems. For instance, take the case of moving something, using the room paradigm. How do we grab stuff and move it? Well, we could take a page from System Shock, and have an inventory, and grab stuff, move to destination, and drop it. But does this seem quicker to you than *click* drag and *unclick* drop? Plus the additionaly requirement of people needing to know how to play a 3D shooter to be able to get around..

Likewise, with the pit paradigm, we're faced with another task; we can see everywhere in the pit, but how do we specify how deep to put something? We find that we can no longer do this easily with a mouse, unless we use the wheel for depth. (And we all know how precise the mouse wheel is.) We can also rule out 3D position-based input devices; can you imagine holding your hands steady for hours without support, while working at your computer? (Talk about unergonomic.)

Anyways, you can see why I'm saying true 3D desktops are unfeasible. Sure, they look nice and everything, but where's the speed advantage? How do they make the user's life easier? The only 3D interfaces I've seen are ButtonFly and the one from Jurassic Park. In the former, the menus look cool, but they don't provide any speed advantage. Likewise in the latter example; the cast in the movie almost get eaten by the raptors 'cause the interface impeded their ability to easily/quickly find and activate the locks. Do you want to be eaten by raptors? ; )

Yes, 3D is cool, but I don't think I'd want it for my desktop. Now if the 3D were only being used for the hardware acceleration of the resizing, etc., that I can understand. But as a native environment for the desktop... no, I wouldn't like that one bit.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore...

[be-fan]

1) Attributes are the future. XFS has them, they must be okay!
2) HFS is oddball in terms of design. Instead of explicit inodes and directories and whatnot, all file records are bunched together in the catalog file. This was cool back in 1980, but today, it means that the filesystem has to be single threaded (giant subsystem mutexes are so passe) and concurrency blows. BFS, on the other hand, is rather standard. Its got explicit inodes, B+ trees for directories, and uses a bitmap to manage free blocks. Nothing oddball at all.

NO! Wait! This is Too Cool to Kill!

[Zzootnik]

I've only recently jumped on the bandwagon with BeOS, but I'm already Extremely impressed with the responsiveness, feel, and power of the Operating System.

I was looking forward to some kind of os updates... with the right supporting programs, this OS could be what makes me switch full time from Wi...er...that other OS...

This is absolutely fantastic...I mean...I've been using and experimenting with computers since I was 13 years old...(so...cripes...18 years???Yeesh...) And this new (to me, at least) os is making me feel like a little kid again...when hardware wasn't cheap, and coding HAD to be tailored to be fast...It's very apparent that a LOT of hard work and love went into crafting this...

Palm? Are you listening? PLEASE don't kill this... Extend it. Release it. Open Source it...Continue it...ANYTHING but kill it...

And..um...Yeah...it's pretty keen...

Palm's Plans

[tswinzig]

Here is an interview with David Nagel discussing some of Palm's plans for the Be assets. This second story is from OSOpinion, and is more speculation about a BeOS based 32-bit OS for Palm due in 2002.

Found these links through BeGroovy.

Three Letters: R O I

[Ars-Fartsica]

Its just a numbers game. You don't port code for which it is unlikely that the costs of making the port will not be recovered through sales. Given the number of desktop BeOS users, you would have been insane to port software to that platform.

Now you can turn that argument around on me and say that a platform isn't worth porting to until there is a set of ported apps existing that make it worthwhile, so someone has to take the risk at some point, with the possible benefits of being first-mover.

That may be true if it weren't for nearly total sautration in the desktop OS market. Everyone in the US who wants a desktop PC already has one (or two). There is very little grwoth in this market, in fact it is arguably flat. Couple this with the fact that 95% of desktop users use Windows, and that is why you will never get ROI on an alternative desktop system at this point.

Re:Three Letters: R O I

[ianezz]

Everyone in the US who wants a desktop PC You said it right: the US.

The whole Amiga mentality

[QuantumG]

I always found it frightening to talk to an Amiga user. There were lots of reasons but probably one of the biggest was this strange opinion towards software developers. I think the reasoning went something like this: If we pay for anything and everything that gets written for our platform, companies will see it is profitable to write applications for our platform and so we'll get a whole lot of applications. This is sort of the "begging for scraps" mentality that BeOS users felt too. It makes sense in a way, but it has some undesirable effects. Firstly, a lot of fly by night companies jump onto the platform and sell really crappy software at rediculous prices and people buy it, not because it is good or even useful, but to "support the platform". Secondly, the majority of developers for the platform become commercially driven. How can I say this about the Amiga platform you may ask? After all, the Amiga was *the* platform of the enthusiast programmer. I think the gaming industry and to a lesser extent the demo scene sucked all them up by the end and you cant really include them in the equation. In my opinion, the real killer is shareware, and in particular "nagware". Firstly it baits you with the illusion that the software doesn't have to be paid for, and then it switches to a "gimme gimme" ultimatum mode that it cant really back up. Strangely, a lot of people even paid for crappy shareware. Not that I'm saying all shareware is crap, but some of it is and if after 30 days you're not satisfied then you should delete it. But that's not the way it worked. Either people would reinstall it for another 30 days or they would actually pay for it out of misplaced guilt or this idea that if you pay for crap you will get something other than crap in return. I've never heard of anyone demanding a bug fix or an extra feature before they sent in the registration fee, have you? But that's the kind of actions that really could make shareware great, I pay you, you supply the product I actually want. The same goes for Free Software, however, in this case I need not pay the original programmer, I can pay anyone to fix my bugs or add features, but does anyone do it? Anyone? No. Both systems fall short of the mark for delivering a feedback loop that can be controlled by the software consumer to deliver great software to an alternate operating system. Maybe in a few years AtheOS will be trying to woo software developers and we'll see it all happen again, but maybe, just maybe, someone will come up with a way to get good software onto the platform in proportion to the enthusiasm that fans feel towards their alternate OS. I cant wait.

Re:The whole Amiga mentality

[BrookHarty]

I always found it frightening to talk to an Amiga user.

That is a rather troll statement. Since I was an old Amiga user and most of my friends where amiga users too. About 50% of them migrated to BSD, 25% migrated to MAC, and the other 25% (and myself) migrated to Linux. We all have windows boxes for games, but all the development and server applications run on a non-windows os.

Most of us had Amiga 1200's or 4000's with more expensive hardware than PC's cost, even today! You could start out with an afordable Amiga 500 for a few hundred bux that could do everything you want, then upgrade to a 4000 and a Toaster and do real production quality work. The toaster is out for PC now and people have migrated along with it.

Honestly, the shareware I bought for my amiga was better than most commerical software. MagicWB, and other workbench add'ons, and Internet apps where where better quality programs than anything out.

The only thing I hated about the Amiga, was some cool games where out for dos/windows that I couldnt play. If Linux could run all my software, I would switch to linux as my desktop. But until then, I have 2 computers on my desk. Windows for desktop and games, linux has file/print server, nat gateway and shell box.

In fact, AMI-TCP for the amiga is what got me addicted to linux, I learned about interfaces(ppp0), tcp, services, ports and the basic unix layout. After setting up AMI-TCP I was able to setup a linux box for dialup rather quickly, and then migrated over to applications. I then got a job for Amiga support at our local ISP, and became a full time sys-admin.

-

#Amiga - Spumoni | i've seen poag sightings as far back as '92, but my friend
bob says I'm seeing things. I tell you, they're real! I
even have a damn picture...out of focus but you can see the
bastard running through the forest

Not done yet...

[mlknowle]

BeOS might not be done yet - the Palm - OS version aside, I have heard rumors that Palm is looking to build a sub-pc notebook (i.e., WinCE league) using BeOS, which is a lot closer to the PC operating system than somthing which runs on an 8mb Palm device.

Even if the source isn't released, any work that is done commercially to keep the code alive is better than what has happened to date.

BeUnited.org and lots of other great sites...

[bc90021]

For those who are interested in the possibility of the BeOS being continued, check out BeUnited.org. Originally "a place to find and support teams for the development of high quality BeOS software", they are now "leading an initiative concerned with the licensing of the BeOS from Palm, Inc. and its subsequent upgrading, development and professional marketing on a global scale".

If they can be successful in licensing the OS from Palm, then the BeOS can continue. They currently have 136 new products or projects in their developer survey. Head over to the site to see how you can help!

Also, for those that don't know, there are several other really good sites dedicated to the BeOS:

The "sourceForge" of the BeOS: BeBits.com.

News and a discussion forum: BeGroovy.com.

Another news site: BeNews.com.

And, of course, the site that sells BeOS 5 Pro, and the Office Suite (available for Windows, too!) that goes along with it: Gobe.com.

Ten cents a share....

[autopr0n]

Must suck for all those people who baught Be at it's IPO price of $6.

Re:Ten cents a share....

[hawk]

>Must suck for all those people who baught Be at it's IPO price of $6.

especially consideing the, what, $200 million that they turned down from apple five years ago . . . with the delusion they were worth twice that . . .

hawk

The "good enough" effect.

[HiyaPower]

Trouble with most folks on this forum (including myself) is that we often forget about the "good enough" effect. That is for the average user, elegance doesn't matter. All they care about is that it is "good enough" to do some simple things and that it comes pre-installed on their computer. As horrid as Windoze is, it is "good enough" for most folks. In the company that I worked for, the average mentality maxed out at less than being able to write an excel macro. Terabyte file systems, etc. that Be had to offer were wasted on these folks. It was good enough that they could click on their mail (which as virus pre-filtered for them), and run the odd pre-canned application. Any of the elegance that most of us like was totally lost on them. It was good enough that it came on the machine complements of Michael Dell.

Mark Twain went broke investing in the best linotype machine on the face of the earth. It could do anything and everything. However, people wanted the machine that was easier to get and "good enough".

OSX Performance

[Doktor Memory]

OSX's major flaw so far has been performance, because the BSD/Mach codebase it's built on it simply unwieldy without further refinement.

Gah. No. OSX has performance issues, yes, but they have zilch to do with Mach/BSD. That codebase is over 15 years old, and is quite mature and refined, thank you.

If you don't believe me on this, grab a PPC mac somewhere, install LinuxPPC and Darwin (the Mach/BSD core of OSX) on it in turn, and time some test compiles in console mode. Linux will win, but the margin will be small and consistant.

OSX's performance issues are all several layers up, in the presentation and windowing systems. Apple scrapped NeXT's old Display Postscript windowing system to build Quartz and Aqua from scratch, and that is one huge heap of immature, unoptimized, and feature-iffic code there. Additionally, a quick look at "top" on most OSX boxes will show you that an inhuman amount of memory and cpu slices are being eaten by the "TrueBlue" OS9 emulation process, aka "Classic."

The first problem will be resolved as the Quartz codebase matures and as newer video drivers start to offload the work onto the cards. The second problem will go away as people find fewer and fewer reasons to run Classic apps.

Re:OSX Performance

[be-fan]

Gah. No. OSX has performance issues, yes, but they have zilch to do with Mach/BSD. That codebase is over 15 years old, and is quite mature and refined, thank you.
>>>>>
You miss an important distinction. OSX is based on old code. Mach was never very good as a microkernel to begin with, and it hasn't been heavily updated in years. FreeBSD on the other hand, is very mature, just like Mach, but has had the benifet of years of massaging in the intervening years. Apple really was out to lunch when it decided to use a Mach/BSD combo. First, it has no real benifets, since the monolithic system server eats any potential gains in stability. Worse, it loses performance for being based on a microkernel. What would have made much more sense for Apple would have been to base OS-X on top of FreeBSD. They would have gotten a much better core OS, the FreeBSD guys would have gotten access to nifty things like XML configuration, and Apple wouldn't have to be in the core OS business.

Re:OSX Performance

[Doktor Memory]

Mach was never very good as a microkernel to begin with

Would you care to quantify that statement? I know that it's quite fashionable in this forum to parrot Linus Torvalds' blithe dismissal of Mach, but nobody ever seems interested in backing it up with any hard data.

and it hasn't been heavily updated in years. FreeBSD on the other hand, is very mature, just like Mach, but has had the benifet of years of massaging in the intervening years.

What an odd and incorrect statement. I don't really know where to begin. Do you really think that during the entire time that Mach was being used as the core of various incarnations of NeXTstep (on both 680x0 and ia32), MkLinux (on PPC, ia32 and PA-RISC) and MacOS X, not to mention countless other projects, that it was not "massaged" and updated significantly?

Apple really was out to lunch when it decided to use a Mach/BSD combo

You dance with who brought you. OSX is based on NeXTstep, and NeXTstep was built on the Mach/BSD core. That codebase was stable, mature, and proven to be portable. They had, and have, no sane reason to rip it out.

First, it has no real benifets, since the monolithic system server eats any potential gains in stability.

More mindless parroting of the party line. Mach/BSD is in no way unstable, and stability is not the only benefit. Think "portability, modularity, features and elegance."

Worse, it loses performance for being based on a microkernel.

So everyone keeps saying, but nobody seems willing to actually back up that assertion with anything other than vague handwaving. (Please, don't waste anybody's time by reminding us how much faster BeOS could draw windows on the screen. We know Quartz is slow. It's just not relevant to this discussion.)

hat would have made much more sense for Apple would have been to base OS-X on top of FreeBSD.

Apple had a deadline to meet for transmuting NeXTstep into OSX, and a market requirement to support their own SMP systems. Attempting to backport the entirety of OpenStep onto FreeBSD would have actively hindered both of those goals, while offering few tangible benefits in return. (Nevermind the unanswered question of just how long a port of FreeBSD to the Mac/PPC platform would take.)

Instead, they did the smart thing: they hired Jordan Hubbard, and ported many of FreeBSD's userland improvements back to the Mach/BSD codebase, and re-released that as Darwin. Everybody won.

and Apple wouldn't have to be in the core OS business.

Why on earth wouldn't they want to be?

Re:OSX Performance

[be-fan]

Would you care to quantify that statement? I know that it's quite fashionable in this forum to parrot Linus Torvalds' blithe dismissal of Mach, but nobody ever seems interested in backing it up with any hard data.
>>>>>>>>
Read the GNU/HURD mailing lists about people wanting to switch HURD over to L4 because Mach just wasn't cutting it.

What an odd and incorrect statement. I don't really know where to begin. Do you really think that during the entire time that Mach was being used as the core of various incarnations of NeXTstep (on both 680x0 and ia32), MkLinux (on PPC, ia32 and PA-RISC) and MacOS X, not to mention countless other projects, that it was not "massaged" and updated significantly?
>>>>>>>
Tons of projects, yes. Huge leaps in capability? No. Take a look at all of the nifty stuff FreeBSD has been doing in the meantime. The VM subsystem has significantly overhauled (read Cranor's UVM paper and Matt Dillon's articles for info) as has the swap system and (with FreeBSD 5.x) the threading model and SMP system. Advances of that magnitude just haven't been made on Mach, plain and simple.

You dance with who brought you. OSX is based on NeXTstep, and NeXTstep was built on the Mach/BSD core. That codebase was stable, mature, and proven to be portable. They had, and have, no sane reason to rip it out.
>>>>>>>>>>
Umm, Apple ended up rewriting a lot of the upper-level software anyway. I would guess that porting to FreeBSD (given that both Mach/BSD and FreeBSD have the same API) wouldn't have cost very much time.

More mindless parroting of theparty line. Mach/BSD is in no way unstable, and stability is not the only benefit. Think "portability, modularity, features and elegance."
>>>>>>>>>>
1) Portability: Do you really think that Mach/BSD is more portable than any monolithic kernel, like Linux or NetBSD? Besides, Apple is the one who is making OS-X uniplatform!
2) Modularity: You call a monolithic system server moduler? Multi-servers are moduler. They're a great use of some of the inherent advantages of microkernels. Monoservers are just stupid.
3) Elegant: How? You take a basterdize the microkernel concept by sticking a monolithic system server on top of it!

So everyone keeps saying, but nobody seems willing to actually back up that assertion with anything other than vague handwaving.
>>>>>>>>>
Umm, just think this through. Say I want to read a byte from a device. Which is going to be faster, sending a message to the system server (which involves one system call to send the message, a slow context switch to change to the system server, code to process the message, another system call to send another message, and another context switch to change to the calling process), or invoking a single system call which involves no context switches?

As for porting, please remember that they ended up porting a good deal of FreeBSD 3.2 to Mach anyway.

This is all Jean-Louis' fault!

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the failure of Be is due to Jean-Louis Gassee's hubris. This man had an inflated sense of self-importance that would even make Steve Jobs blush. If he had realized what his company was really worth he would have taken the $100 million offered by Apple in '96. At that time -- even though not fully developed -- BeOS ran rings around the original Mac OS on PowerPC hardware. It would have also allowed the new Mac OS to be brought to market much faster. Instead he wanted much more, Apple went with NeXT, and now Be is trying to satisfy creditors and shareholders with the paltry sum they received from Palm.

While talking about alternative futures it's interesting to think about what would have happened had Apple used the NT kernel instead of NeXT or Be. According to Gil Amelio, Gates was on the phone almost every day trying to convince him that NT was the best route. Amelio's book is an interesting read for this very subject and gives some insight as to why Apple went with NeXT instead of Be or Microsoft.

Re:NO! Wait! This is Too Cool to Kill!

[hawk]

>There might even be a shareholder lawsuit in
>that.

Give it up. The sanctions against you for filing that *frivolous* and bad faith suit won't put enough into Be's/Palm's cofferes to bring the OS back.

The bare statement, "We believe that the long term prospects are better if we don't do that" are sufficient to win the cas. It's called the "business judgment rule."

Of course, the case would never get that far before being dismissed with sanctions . . .

hawk, esq.

Sad.

[be-fan]

My machine has been all Linux for several months now. Its not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but its not great either. After tons customization (XFS, pre-kernels, preemptive + lock breaking patches, custom compilations, f**king with fonts for days on end, etc) Linux feels almost as fast as Win2K. Most of the time, anyway. All my Galeon windows still freeze up for several second at a time while one of them is loading /. (I miss multithreading), AbiWord still has butt-ugly non AA fonts, XMMS still sometimes skips when I'm doing multiple compiles at the same time, GTK+ apps still dump on me at totally random moments, Sylpheed won't copy and paste into gedit, and the GNOME file panal is still as braindead as ever. Its not all bad, however. Compiles run faster than they used to. Urpmi is truely nifty. Sylpheed is a good mail client, and XFS is an awesome filesystem. I finally have good compile tools (ICC), and I've found the power of 'vi' because I've been forced (thanks /etc!) to use it so much. Still, its not BeOS. This is depressing...

Re:Sad.

[redcliffe]

I use KDE, and have found that Konqueror never freezes while loading pages. The AA works very nicely too. If you want something closer to BeOS, you may like to try Atheos.

Re:Sad.

[be-fan]

Unfortunately, KDE has the small problem that everything takes days to load. Its far more polished than GTK+/GNOME, but damn is it slow. Funny thing. I was using Windows XP the other day at Circuit City. I was amazed how speedy it was. Considering how badly configured store-display machines are, this did not say much for KDE...

One thing is for sure..

[Dutch_Cap]

..BeOS will Be the only OS that can get my nipples hard for a long, long time.

No matter how good another OS is, now matter how outdated BeOS will become, to me nothing will ever Be as good. No OS will ever Be as sexy, as much fun to use. (I'm sorry is all this writing Be with a capital letter becoming annoying?). I guess I'm a zealot.

Linux lacks any trace of cohesion and X is too slow, especially after Be's mega-responsive-fully-multithreaded goodness. I simply can't stand KDE and Gnome, not after using Be's oh-so-close-to-perfection GUI. Windows is too slow, bloated and insecure. Moreover, I oppose Microsoft on principle grounds. Mac hardware is too expensive and OSX probably too slow.

..Will I ever fall in love again?

Mirrors

[MathJMendl]

Here are a couple of good mirrors for BeOS 5.01 I noticed:

http://ftp.pcworld.com/pub/system/other/beospe.exe

ftp://ftp.kando.hu/.3/beos/beos/BeOS5-PersonalEdit ion.exe

Re:BeOS PE Improved Any?

[Splat]

I resent the modding of my comment down to "Troll" as this is NOT FUD. I LIKE BeOS and I am NOT here to trash it.

I am merely making a personal observation of the one time myself and a few companions download BeOS Personal Edition and tried it out.

The killing of any process, by process number, by issuing the command:

"kill "

resulted in the interface of the system locking up with a reboot.

Now that you have answered my question (thank you!) I would please hope that anyone with moderator points reading this comment would take the time to analyze my comment a bit more carefully before the knee-jerk reaction comes into play.

Re:It's not because it's gone...

[redcliffe]

You could try Atheos. It's not a BeOS clone, but is quite like a combination of it and AmigaOS, and is under rapid development. It's also under the GPL. It's aiming for the market of people who don't want to fiddle to get the OS the way they want it. The OS has an integrated GUI/desktop, instead of the Linux style of Kernel-Usermode-XFree86-WindowManager. It's mostly POSIX compliant, and has many Linux apps ported already. It might be just what you're looking for.

hmm

[Suppafly]

Seems like some of the stockholders and investors would sue Be Inc. for failing to follow thru with due diligence or something for all of the bad business decisions they made along the line.

Vegan arguments

[QuantumG]

You dont make much of an argument. Due to the immoral practices of today's "animal industry" you choose not to partake in the consumption of their product. Is this supposed to achieve anything? I guess you are of the belief that if enough people stop eating their product they will go out of business and all the friendly little animals will be set free. Well it aint happening. The industry neither knows, nor cares about your silent protest, for exactly that reason, it's silent. Believe it or not, there are actually people on this planet who are opposed to the same thing as you (animal cruelty) who proactively do something about it. They infultrate piggery units and get pictures of red neck cowboys beating animals to death. They use this intelligence to convince people to boycott on a massive scale, or have units shut down in countries that have animal cruelty laws.

But that's not what a vegan is about now is it? A vegan doesn't eat any animal products, including milk and cheese. I think you would be hard pressed to find a maltreated dairy animal (with any reasonable definition of exploitation that is). Apparently our vegan friends would have us believe that animal life (at such a low level as their individual cells) are somehow more important than plant life. ie, it's ok to eat a turnip, but it's not ok to drink cow's milk. To be purely reductionist, cell nucleii are sacred. But I submit that if vegans were to somehow achieve their goal of the elimination of the "animal industry" they would have a profoundly negative effect on animal life. Both the chickens in my moral conundrum we bred in captivity. Actually, they were probably bred in cages and had their beaks torn off at an early age so they dont damage each other, but that's your argument, not theirs. Our vegan friends would have us never have brought these chickens into existance in the first place. Apparently our exploitative intentions somehow forfit the animal's chance to have a life (no matter how short or unpleasant that life may be).

If your gripe with the animal industry is limited to the maltreatment of animals I would suggest that you behave proactively about it, but dont support those who would do away with the animal industry in the name of sacred animal rights -- these people want to end animal's lives before they have even started.

But assuming that both the chickens below were (and respectively will be) maltreated, what do you do? What is the moral thing to do? Do you eat the chicken (having consumed meat that came from an animal that suffered) or do you condem the live chicken to die a long horrible death?(note that this is a modification purely for your moral ideology).

Re:NO! Wait! This is Too Cool to Kill!

[hawk]

And I mean that filing a lawsuit to do that would be an abuse of the legal system and subect to serious sanctions.

If they have *any* expectation of using *any* of the technology in the future, it is far from obvious that licensing it is in the best interests of the store.

hawk, esq.

Re:Opening Be wouldn't matter...Nor Apple either

[darkPHi3er]

I'll expedite my answer, because i'm time impaired.

"It's also becoming increasingly clear that the only honest-to-gods challenge to Windows desktops is going to be as it always was, Apple.

as a serious OG Apple user (Apple II and a 128K Beige Toaster, have a G4 Tower 2' away from me right now, so please keep your flames to yourself)

It's actually becoming increasingly clear that Apple is on Microsoft's Life Support System, probably for antitrust reasons.

The high-end home/soho/small biz market that has kept Apple going would bail in legions if MS withdrew Microsoft Office from the Mac platform. That's why Steve's Funny Fruit Machine Company has been on MS' tip these last few years...

for one example, where's Apple's own great browser, the number one most important app for ANY consumer platform?

"Apple's finally rising to the challenge, with the -support- of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit"

this would be how many times in the last decade that Apple has "fully committed" itself to the business market?

i remember 3 major announcements on this, and one of my coworkers remembers 5.

for just one biz sector example, Where's Apple's Killer SQL Server RDBMS? that's the biz equivalent of the browser, the key app that would sell to midrange businesses....

"Instead of considering Apple a closed-source evil, look at them as a company that knows how to do three things well. They know how to design killer hardware, they know how to create a user interface that doesn't suck, and they know how to -survive-. You don't get bitch-slapped in the marketplace by Microsoft for nearly two decades and remain in business by living on your stock inflation alone."

i COMPLETELY agree with all 3 points.

None of which has anything to do with what the business market wants.

1. Commodity Prices on H/W

2. Near-Commodity Prices on S/W

3. Readily available VAR/Integrator/Consultant services at competitive prices.

4. Huge accumulation of shrink wrapped biz apps with minimum expenditures on data conversion

5. Off-the-shelf mid-tier solutions that are installable/operable/maintainable by lower-cost employees

I've loved virtually all my Mac's over the years. (except one LC and one Performa) Just about slept with my 840 and my VX, but Steve and Apple are NOT driven by consumer needs

they are driven by the "Neat Factor", it's given me a lot enjoyment over the years, but it's not a perspective that will earn you a big consumer and mid-sized biz market share, they care much more about the "Cost Factor"