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Ten Years of BeOS
Tracker writes "BeOS was released to developers officially for the first time ten years ago. OSNews has a charming write-up about the BeOS, some interesting historical events since 1994, and a few anecdotes as well. Today, BeOS still lives on with projects like the freeware BeOS Max (built upon BeOS 5 PE), the open source re-implementation from scratch OpenBeOS and YellowTAB's commercial Zeta OS (based on unreleased and updated code of what would have been 'BeOS 6' if Be wasn't purchased by Palm in 2001)."
IMHO a very good approach, as using the Linux kernel and XFree86 will take care of the lack-of-drivers problem that the original BeOS had. Also, this will give it decent OpenGL performance for free, which was also one of the weak points of the original BeOS (and will be one of the other sucessors).
It didn't. The difference was the BeOS 5 PE could be launched from an icon on your desktop and booted in virtually no time at all (~15 seconds including hardware detection?). BeOS *was* being distributed with Windows PCs, unlike linux, which was pretty rough round the edges then. BeOS had all the ease of a user-centric destkop OS, and could be easily bundled on the same PC. MS didn't like that at all and killed it dead.
So BeOS DIDN'T settle a lawsuit with MS concerning dual-booting?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
- AtheOS is no longer developed, and the codebase has not been updated in several years.
- Syllable is our community-driven fork of AtheOS, which was started two years ago.
- AtheOS domain lapsed and is now hosting a knock-off website hawking drugs
We're halfway through development of Syllable 0.5.4, which like all previous releases of Syllable, will rock. We support a whole bunch of hardware, have developed the codebase heavily and for those of you who were familiar with Kurt Skuans style of working with AtheOS, we have a far more open development model. All are welcome to contribute. You can even download a LiveCD if you want to give it a spin.Syllable : It's an Operating System
Actually from what I've seen, a lot is in there. PalmSource (not to be confused with PalmOne mind you) seems to have put a ton of work into making Palm OS a *real* OS with the same mentality that BeOS had (sorry has) of working multimedia into the core of the OS. Let's just say that mine was one of many jaws dropping at PalmSource earlier this year.
So yes, there is a lot of Be in Cobalt (multimedia, POSIX, etc)
Now we just have to see were the market is going. PalmSource seems to be looking at Garnet (which is targeted at the small foot-print phone market space) as the cash cow for the future. I had hoped that Sony would lead the charge and release a Cobalt Clie (as they tend to beat the more conservative PalmOne to market on such things) but with them dropping out. Outlook not so good. I just hope that Colbalt doesn't get infected with the same ahead-of-its-time issue that BeOS suffered. At least to PalmSource's credit, they really bent over backwards to make the old PalmOS stuff work, without polluting the new too badly. (If BeOS had had a WINE for MacOS emulator to bridge the app gap, it might have done better.)
That lawsuit was settled in September of 2003. When they were down to a skeleton company w/ 1 employee - their lawyer. They settled because they had no money to continue fighting, and needed to pay creditors.
So yes, after microsoft put them out of business by eliminating the market through monopolistic business practices, Be sued them for it and settled for 23 million when they couldn't go on.
This doesn't eliminate the original point.. it only shows how fully destroyed they were by Microsoft.