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BeOS Lives on in the Form of Zeta
DgtlDivide writes "BeOS, one of the pinnacle examples of something really good that died far before it should have, is apparently not quite dead yet. BeOS has continued to captivate a large and devoted community. The Haiku project is working on an Open Source version of the OS and now out of Germany comes Yellowtab's Zeta, a continuation of an unreleased development version of BeOS code-named "Dano." Is Zeta worth the price? Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?"
It depends - does it have that arrogant SOB Gasse running things? If it does - it's doomed. If not, perhaps they will stand a chance. With Apple now moving to Intel hardware - there is a better chance of BeOS finding it's way onto that hardware.
Having used an older version - it was definitely unique and ahead of it's time. That being said, it will have to have changed a great deal between when I saw it last, and it's next incarnation, otherwise - the current crop of Mac OS X and Windows XP / Vista already does what BeOS did.
Zeta/Be has one serious, and ultimately fatal, flaw. It is single user. Nobody in their right mind is going to put anything important on a Be box. Maybe single user (and no meaningful file permissions) would pass in the days of Mac OS 9 or Win 95, but the world has moved on. Security is a real issue for everyone. No matter how much developer and hardware support Zeta gets, it will always suffer from that one fatal design flaw.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
What I would like to see is BeOS and Plan9 (now Inferno) hook up. Inferno makes a great low-level environment, as it makes the entire network seem like a single system. However, the front-end isn't that great and there are very few user applications for it.
BeOS has plenty of user apps, but sucks at clustering and handling distributed resources. It also doesn't have much in the way of "serious" server applications. As such, using BeOS as a user-side OS and Inferno as the server-side, would seem the obvious match.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I havent booted BeOS for a month or two now, but IIRC everything had the same style posix permissions as every other *nix you've layed your hands on. Only difference was that there was only ever one user (named 'Baron'). I think most of it is just waiting for someone to write the backend.
Back when Be was still making BeBoxes (best name ever) they were already doomed. My roommate had a Be system and I got to play around with it a bit. It was extremely nice, especially with the way it handled media (you could play multi channel audio back when even getting full duplex working on OSS was a major pain in the butt).
The problem was that it was somewhat difficult to port applications to the box. The networking in particular seemed to cause lots of problems. This ment that in 1996 (I think) there were still no decent webbrowsers for Beos. That sort of problem was endemic with Beos too. Unless you were willing to port the applications yourself, about the only thing you could do with the OS was give people impressive multimedia demos and explain how cool the filesystem is. Granted, there was a community around porting applications to Be, but they weren't well organized from what I saw.
It's possible Be has changed in the time since I saw it last, and now has a compatability layer that lets it compile stuff written for Linux right out of the box (does it support X apps yet?), but even with that it's hard to see why I would want to use it.
I read the internet for the articles.
And before modding me as flaimbait, let me explain. Disclaimer: I've coded (and been paid to do so) on Mac OS 7/8/9/X, DOS, Win 95/98/2000/XP, Palm OS 3/4/5/6, Linux, HPUX, Solaris, etc... Basicly I'm a Rodney King of OSs, they all have merits and they all suck in some way. Open your mind and code a bit before you flame an OS
I had a friend years back that actually *owned* a BeBox, in all it's blue blinking glory. At the time, we were Mac coders. We marvled at the twin LED cpu load meters on the sides, we watched the wicked kewl graphics demos that really should not have been possible at that time. And we were in awe...
Then they dropped the hardware. Understandable, they were Years Ahead Of Their Time(TM) on case mods, and hardware leads to actual loss. (Where as software, short of your cost in printed packaging and plastic CDs is slim.) Fine, it ran on a Mac, there where UMax clones to be had, and all was good...
Then Jobs came back. Good for Apple, bad for any clone vendor or anyone trying to make an OS *other* than MacOS run. (And lets face it folks even if you are a Mac zealot, you have to admit that OS 7/ early OS 8 (basicly OS 7 *skinned*) sucked pretty hard. Be ran circles around it. Hell even my cheap Linux laptop with X was doing painted window drags as opposed to the "outline" window move) Fine, Be went to x86, and some of us where like "kewl", but by then the alternate OS crowd was all about Linux and all the hot stuff was for Linux, so it was still just a toy. The other kick in the head was the rumors that Apple was about to buy Be (knowing the OS was damn kewl) but Job (again) stepped in and said, no, we're going to take my failed company Next and use that. (Any one else here about the Steve Jobs/Star Trek link of every other company/movie sucking) So another strike. I was able to play with "Rhapsody" way back then and the Yellow Box/Blue Box world of the Mac of tomorrow. (Ribbing the Mac people that they were bending to the POSIX side of the force.)
So be goes limping along. They beg vendors to install Be dual boot with Windoze *for*free*. No go. In the mean time, *some* of us got over the fact that Jobs killed the Newton, got a Palm III (which was finally, in our eyes, a viable, hackable platform) and being the MetroWerks people that we were and oh so familiar API for the Palm, switched over. (The GCC port was a big help to.) All was well.
I switched over to the dark side for a few years and did some Windoze coding (for food), still dabbling in Mac coding and Palm. OS X (finally) arrived. I moved my cheese to be able to get paid to code for the Palm. All was good. And then came the faithful PalmSource where we all learned that some of the essence of Be had seeped into Palm and OS 6 (Cobalt, that damn blue again) It was deva vu all over again. Watching the rotating cubes (again) and all of the other fun things I was seeing again for the first time. I was overjoyed... but with that same nagging feeling that this was not going to end well. Even as we partyed with Skyy Vodka and all of the other glowing blueness... the curse was there....
And here we are, PalmSource axed the BeNess of Cobalt and is going Linux (and was just bought out.) And someone is going to even *try* and hint that Be will "make a come back". I for one will be staying the hell away from it at all costs.
I expect to hear of some freak meteor accident with a key developer in the near future.