Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Is it me or is the black armband at the top of the logo new?
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.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
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.
"And like that
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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".
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.
Here are a couple of good mirrors for BeOS 5.01 I noticed:
e
t ion.exe
http://ftp.pcworld.com/pub/system/other/beospe.ex
ftp://ftp.kando.hu/.3/beos/beos/BeOS5-PersonalEdi
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison