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Be Throws in the Towel
darrad writes: "ZDNet is reporting that 'Be, the failed maker of a computer operating system once considered a rival to Microsoft's Windows, said Monday it would dissolve itself on March 15 and delist from the Nasdaq stock market.'" The Be front page says the same, and explains that this is the natural conclusion of the company's sale of most of its property to Palm.
and thanks for all the non-GPL'ed code...
Is this really newsworthy? The dissolution is really just a formality after everything went to Palm.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Was
Clever writers.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
What will Palm do with it? Does it fit in to their plans? Any chance of releasing some stuff open source?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Is the lawsuit vs. MSFT still on? The PR is still on the front page, but can the suit be continued after Be is dissolved?
Here's a link for those who still want to try it ;)
e
http://ftp.pcworld.com/pub/system/other/beospe.ex
Life sucks.
From the latest press release:
... solely for the purposes of prosecuting and defending lawsuits (including but not limited to pursuing its antitrust case against Microsoft)..."
"Be will continue to exist for three years after the dissolution becomes effective
Nice technology, clever stuff, but c'mon, that's like saying.. oh, wait, this is /., never mind.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Isn't a requiem for Be a little late?
I am a BeOS supporter, as I love the OS. However, I have not run the OS on a primary machine for over 2 years. BeOS users need to recognize that the only hope for Be is a Free Be, and that is not going to happen. YellowTab, as far as I know, does not have the source to the licensed code. So therefore, any changes they make are going to be cosmetic and not core changes.
The way I see it, if you really like the BeOS, head over to the Open-Source Be like projects like openbeos and pledge your support with money or code.
-= Xafloc =-
alinuxbox.com
N
Nope. Be was in the running to be the basis of Apple's new OS, but Gasse thought that he had them over a barrel and was asking WAY too much money. Apple turned around and bought NeXT instead. Now, Steve Jobs is back at the helm of Apple, and Gasse is out of business. Hardly the fault of Apple.
What I want to know is, does this effect them at all?
they were a worthy competitor, microsoft will be picking itself up, dusting off the scratches and bruises, and moving on to try and win the desktop. it's a tough business and only stronger competitors lay in its future. apple, i guess, is next, or next is apple!??
More like a rival to Amiga. Except with less software.
I think, grammatically, "Have Been" would be a better fit, though "Has Been" has a certain ring, too.
the towel is really a database and you can set user-defined attributes on the towel. The towel is also built from the ground-up to support SMP, has very low latency, and a well thought-through user interface.
(the sound of Be's second CPU being unchecked)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But I am still trying to come up with Be users and advocates I know who I can laugh at.
Remember when Be was going take over the world yet us "free software zealots" who wanted the source code kept saying "but...what if Be goes under or becomes some kind of tyrant?"
Hopefully they learned that freedom means giving control of the software as well as its power to its users. Power contained in the hands of the few is little power at all.
If they're going to go ahead with their lawsuit (which may well result in a large settlement down the road), but they're dissolving and distributing now, what happens to any monies collected from the lawsuit?
Any lawyers want to fill us in? Do the shareholders (potentially) get some of it down the road, or does it go to some other mysterious land (assuming all debts are paid off)?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I always thought they would have been more successful if they changed their name to "Beer".
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Now we can call it "Been".
Or maybe instead of folding the company, they should just rename it to Was, Inc.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
They've been dead ever since they decided to "change focus" from multimedia to networking. They had steinberg lined up, high-end sound card makers were starting to announce driver support plans, then they "change focus." As if the networking niche wasn't completely saturated already. Too bad, they could've given mac a run for their money in the multimedia market . . .
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
To that end, I'd like to start the rumor now that Be, Amiga and IBM are teaming up to make AmBeOS/2, which will feature a telepathic user interface, 128 bit memory access, and an AI module that actually does your thinking for you.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Apple turned around and bought NeXT instead.
Apple offered ~$120 million for Be. Gassee asked for $200 million. Apple wound up buying NeXT for $400 million.
Think what you will, but it's a fairly obvious "20/20 hindsight" conclusion that price was not the determining factor.
It was really kinda neat and worked well in the limited cpacity it could...
But it had gotten right in architecture design, they more than made up for in terms of application and hardware support.
I know, the software is chicken and egg syndrome for a proprietary operating system, but they needed something to appeal. They at least had a focus, multimedia applications, but they didn't even have a decent MPEG-1 decoder, only a really slower, really low quality decoder, and that was, unfortunately, perhaps the best Be ever got with a widespread media format/codec. If they had given away the platform from the start with the Development tools, they might have garnered enough application support to carry them further. It seems to me after free.be.com started doing its thing, that BeBits started to pick up in development efforts. If they had been around before Linux had gotten a lot of decent multimedia and desktop support, they might have stood a better chance.
As far as hardware, for a multimedia OS, the video card drivers were always crap. Rarely did they support stuff like YUV overlays, and they expected to be a good multimedia OS? Sorry, but I don't think so.
The reality is now you have MS for most all desktop users, Mac for the anti-establishment, but non-techincal people with money to throw at overpriced hardware, and Linux for geeks like me, which now has decent multimedia playback and desktop software. Not good for content creation or gaming (but could be with the right applications..), but quite suitable for so much else...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This is indeed very sad news, but I think everyone saw the writing on the wall.
:(
Since it was written as a media OS it handled sound and video recording much better than Windows.
Latency to video and audio hardware was often as much as 90% less than same hardware running Windows or even Linux and a lot of people that used proprietary recording software on BeOS would be the first to tell you how awesome this OS was.
RIP BeOS
--Jon
Does this mean my Be(en)Box is worth some money?
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
Tonight I will fire up the ole PC Server 704 in salute to their wonderful work.
Yes it is installed, yes it does boot, yes it is quite bad ass (: (yes I leave it off due to emense power consumption)
IBM PC Server 704 (image) - I'll make some webcam shots of the bad boy tonight too.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The inertia in things like operating systems and programming languages continues to frustrate me. If you aren't a mere extension to the dominant technology, you may as well not bother. If you're something significantly different, but only a few hundred percent better, you may as well not bother. The inertia is just too great for really good ideas to be adopted quickly.
Be will be a lesson to those who hadn't already learned from NeXT, Amiga, etc. When Be first started, I remember commenting to a friend that "there's a group that just doesn't get it." I've hoped ever since that I would turn out to be wrong. I wasn't talking about their technology, which I always admired. It was the insurmountable market barriers that they would face.
If you're not 10x better, the only approach that seems to work is to find a whole new market niche to go for.
(Sorry, this next part is going to sound like a troll, but...) Even Linux is a bit depressing. So much talent out there, and the best we can come up with is the amazing innovation of cloning a 30 yr old OS? Free and open source aren't technical innovations, they're marketing innovations.
There's so much research in OS theory, in programming languages, in user interfaces and human-computer interaction -- so many great ideas from the 80s and 90s that will take another generation to reach the daily lives of most of us professional developers.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Well this is also a problem... immediately when it became apparent that Be was in big trouble, there opened at least three different open source Be clone-projects. Now at best we'll get a bunch of uncompleted Be-clones and maybe one or two usable systems. At worst we'll get a whole lot of Be-clones, each one with it's own quirks and problems, and developers for Be will have to code around quirks right and left to make anything work on all the Be-like systems. To make things worse, at least BlueOS have already started thinking about extending the API, so that in the end nothing will be compatible with anything, but everything will be "almost" compatible.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
Be wanted to create an OS that was superior to Windows and Mac OS. That was EASY TO DO. Back then, MS and Apple operating systems SUCKED ROYALLY and ANYONE could make something better. Some companies actually did make something better (OS/2). Even Apple and MS could have made something better if they started from scratch, however they both realized (correctly) that application support is far more important than kernel threading, so they stuck with their crappy backwards-compatible OSes.
Everyone was, at that time, aware of the "chicken and egg" problem: a new platform has no software, so no users will migrate to it, so nobody will write software, etc. This problem had doomed every new platform. Everyone was aware of it. Be decided to forge ahead anyway, while offering no solution to this problem whatsoever.
The result, predictably, was that BeOS had no applications. Running that nifty teapot demo got a little old, and nobody felt compelled to pay for it.
If you're going to make a new commercial desktop OS, forge an alliance with Adobe etc and have app makers lined up BEFOREHAND. The game console makers know this.
tom
I thought they already sold the towel to Palm.
I still have Beos installed on my machines and boot into it occasionally to see if BeAcid has suddenly appeared. It hasn't. I will definately look into OpenBeos when it gets more fleshed out, and look forward to the day I can stop using something I hate (windows) to make something I love (music)
IBM would have launched the last installation of CD into outer space 5 years ago if they could figure out how to get all the banks that insist on using it to move to Windows. It's a pain in the ass when the customers base makes support of an OS you'd rather be forgotten a requirement for future contracts with you.
Nonetheless inside IBM itself, the OS is all but dead and that is the most telling sign that it's gone the way of the dodo. It's not on my desktop now, but it was mandated to be for all IBMers at one point. The once active discussion forums rarely see any traffic and when they do, it's some bitter OS/2 advocate bitching about how the company fucked the OS/2 community over. All development now takes place in India, Latvia and Austin Texas, although from what I understand of the arrangements, Austin just directs the overseas shops and doesn't do a lot of hands on itself.
OS/2 IS dead. It may remain in use damn near forever in niche markets where solutions already exist and developing new ones isn't a priority, but so will MS DOS 5.0. They will never fix any of the problems that prevented the OS from completely owning the desktop environment (And they easily COULD have owned the desktop with SO little work.) They will never add a new feature that isn't demanded by some large bank backed by the threat of several multi-million dollar contracts that they could take elsewhere. And you will never again be able to walk into CompUSA and go "I Wanna buy me some OS/2" and have anyone there know what the hell you are talking about.
Do I necessarily like that? No! I was a staunch advocate. I did the team OS/2 thing. I still have the letters of appreciation from IBM corporate thanking me for working the '95 COMDEX. I was the first IBM OS/2 Certified engineer working the phones at IBM Boca. I know how close IBM was to taking the desktop market away from Microsoft. But there comes a time when you just have to let go. IBM screwed the pooch and Microsoft won again. Just accept it.
By the way, Solaris isn't dead, but it's starting to smell a little.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In any case, why would Palm have bought Be in the first place if they didn't have any plans for it?
Because they wanted Be's engineers. Yah, they'll probably use some of Be's BeIA code in the next PalmOS, which would be great, but from what I remember their main motivation was a bunch of kick-ass engineers for a pittance. And some decent code too.
So, Apple buys a multi-user UNIX workstation OS with no major multimedia tricks to offer, instead of a fast, lean media system. They pay twice as much, and basically waste three years trying to get the two groups of programmers to speak to each other. (I can just imagine the OS development team meetings: "Okay, we're going to use AppleScript for this utility."..."No, you're not! It's csh or nothing!")
They release this two-headed monster, and after four updates and two CPU speed bumps, it is actually responsive enough to keep die-hard Mac fans from complaining endlessly. Of course, you still have to enter a password to install new screensaver, and there still isn't a Photoshop port, but if you're a UNIX weenie with a hardware fetish, it's a pretty fun system to play around with.
Conclusion: the Jobs personality cult cost Apple's users the possiblity of a sane upgrade to their beloved OS, and instead gave them an ugly duckling which may eventually reclaim most of the usability of the "Classic" MacOS.
Stupid Steve.
As I said, if you want success, you have to target a new niche. That doesn't guarantee success, but not doing so virtually guarantees failure, given the inertia I'm talking about.
;-)
Steve didn't kill Be. He just didn't save it. Nobody else saved it, either, but I don't know if anyone could have. Yes, he bought NeXT, and where is NeXT OS now? Is it saved? Yes, well probably on some archive tape somewhere.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Number of BeOS apps on store shelves = 0
I live in the Bay area. Best Buy had BeOS and a few apps on their shelves. Fry's had a bunch of BeOS apps. So did Micro Center.
"Be will be a lesson to those who hadn't already learned from NeXT, Amiga, etc."
:)
Amiga had a chance, and failed because Commodore mis-managed and under-promoted it. The fan base was there, the tech was there (at the time), and there were probably more apps then BeOS ever had.
NeXT failed because the hardware was dumb. It started with a 4bit grey-scale display when EGA, VGA, and Amiga graphics were not only better, but cheaper. NeXT boxes only had CD-ROMs for removable media. The only way they could share data was on a network, and only the far more expensive machines were online. Worst of all, they cost $5k with an academic discount, or $10k without. A fully loaded PC or Amiga was $4k or less and had apps, a floppy drive, and could talk to anything.
Be failed because it has no reason to exist anymore. It would have been great before DirectX 7 or accelerated XFree86. The one thing they tried to do better than anyone else was being done well enough for free by Linux and *BSD.
Amiga was a lesson in marketing. NeXT was a lesson in timing (we weren't ready). BeOS was a lesson in timing too (we already had it). Three very different lessons that I'm glad _I_ didn't directly pay for.
Ok you must know that you don't need a password to install a new screen saver (at least not for the current user), you simply put the file in ~/Libaray/ScreenSavers/. If you want to install a system wide on you need access to the system wide Library, which may require a password.