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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.
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.
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
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.
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)?
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".
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?
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."
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