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Current Owner of BeOS Code Claims Zeta is Illegal
Hank Powers writes "The legal status of the Zeta operating system that was derived from the source code Be Inc. left shortly before going bankrupt has been unclear for several years. Now, the current owner of the source code, ACCESS, claims "if Herr Korz feels that he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he's been using, we're completely unaware of it, and I'd be fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that claim". The sales of Zeta have been suspended and so has the development been halted as well. OSNews has an article about the recent developments."
Obviously you didn't read the article to which you linked:
In other words, no PalmOS on their Linux phone. They've been "planning" it for years. They announced they'd be releasing it in 2006. 2007 will be at least half over, and they'll still be "planning" it. Liars.
Wishing doesn't make it so, for you either.
--
make install -not war
...and it only appears now....
Gotta love slashdot. I also seem to have recalled explaining a few more things in my summary that would have prevented the fringe element from heading off into conspiracy land as well....
First off, the reason why ACCESS is only *now* responding on this issue is because Korz was making overtures towards open sourcing the code--something that ACCESS could not keep silent about. As Lefty says in his comments both at bitsofnews and OSNews.com, they'd been sending cease and desist letters for some time already and Korz was ignoring them. To try and take legal action would be only to invite lawsuits over code that ACCESS saw no income from; so why should they stick out their necks for a libel suit with the possibility of generating only negative income? It is only because ACCESS wanted to prevent any possibility of Korz giving away their property they chose to risk the possible libel suit now.
Secondly, 'Zeta' was a dead parrot. It was NOT truly being developed, because obviously Korz did NOT have access (pun unintended) to the source code or he would have done more with it. The only true successor to BeOS is Haiku, which as I stated in my summary is nearing its 1.0 release with all originally developed closed-room re-engineered code that is BeOS R5 compatible.
Third, BeOS Max PE which is developed by a Greek coder to be the best and most updated (using bits of third party hacks and including newer drivers for more hardware as well as bits of Haiku that work better than the old BeOS parts) may be forced to discontinue development. This is something that would be a tragedy, since it is thanks to Vaspar's work on this (free) project many of us are able to run BeOS on new hardware. And I say that as someone who bought BeOS in the store almost a month or two before the announcement they were going bankrupt.
--bornagainpenguin
For info: the Haiku website is http://haiku-os.org/
Legally, there is a difference because Haiku does not use any BeOS code. It is a binary-compatible reimplementation, not a derivative work. The relationship between Haiku and BeOS is similar to the relationship between Linux and Unix. On the surface they look similar and work similar, but under the hood they are very different animals.
This poo is cold.
He didn't say open source projects are immune to IP litigation. He said that they are immune to what happened to BeOS (and tons of other cool software) --- having a company sit on perfectly good code without any intention of either continuing it as a product or freeing it so the community can continue development.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...