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Zeta Goes Gold

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the obscurantism dept.

*no comment* writes "Be lives! yellowTAB has announced it's 1.0 release of Zeta has gone Gold and has sent it off to production. The word is that in about 2 weeks, you can have your hands on the latest version of this BeOS derivative."

3 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Do they or do they not have the source legally? by CyricZ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I remember hearing that there was some speculation that they did not legally have the BeOS source code. While they would never comment on it, some people suggested that they must have had access to the code in order to perform some of the modifications they have done. Other people have suggested that they have merely patched previous binary releases. Now, my question is: do they or do they not have the source code to BeOS? If so, is it legal or illegal?

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
    1. Re:Do they or do they not have the source legally? by OSXexpert · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There is no question about the source leak. If you hung around the BeShare community long enough starting right after PalmOS bought the IP and engineers for 11 million, you could have a copy of the tarball. BTW, it was corrupted, only parts of the tarball came available to the general masses. I know, I downloaded from a BeSharer the tarball, uncompressed it and indeed had the sources. Kernel sources (partials), stuff like malloc and such. Seriously, the BeOS core code was last dated 1992-93, not kidding. A LOT of the core of the BeOS was and such still is in the form of Zeta/Beta, 12-13 years old. Now, that is true with a lot of other OS's, NeXTStep/OSX is a good example (classnames are NSClassName for example, too complex to change for both Apple and old time developers).... However, Zeta is not even available legally in source to anyone. Palm has denied it to Zeta, and to the community at large (in 2001 there was a campaign to get the source opened, PalmOS said forget-about-it with a big FU to boot coming from the 'community' in response).

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      --- Old Time NeXThead
  2. Zeta Beta by debilo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They've been selling beta versions of Zeta on German television for months touting it as virus and trojan free, and claiming it was actually "faster than Linux", whatever that's supposed to mean, showing it to run on a (supposedly) P1 with 128 MB while playing 6 video files simultaneously. I always got a good laugh out of that, but I'll probably try it out soon nonetheless. Can anyone comment on the quality of the beta version?