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.

[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.

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

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...

[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...

[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.

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.

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

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".

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: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.

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: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?