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

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the and-i-feel-fine dept.

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.

4 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Black armband by Therlin · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. Re:This is exactly why we need Free software. by tswinzig · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --

    "And like that ... he's gone."
  3. The "good enough" effect. by HiyaPower · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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".

  4. This is all Jean-Louis' fault! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.