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."

Comments

Nothing to see here, yadda yadda...

[pla]

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".

Perhaps some insider can make this issue more clear (yes, I R'd TFA), but this seems like a non-issue. As I understand it...

This company ACCESS legitimately owns the rights to BeOS. Korz/YellowTAB never had any right to continue work on it as Zeta, and may even have started the project based on leaked source code. But PalmSource never cared, and YellowTAB never bothered doing more than sending nastygrams every few months, probably because they saw no possible financial incentive to do so.

So overall, this sounds an awfully lot like ACCESS has zero interest in BeOS/Zeta(/Haiku?), but their lawyers have advised them to send a periodic reminder of "oh, BTW, we own this", just so they can eat the whole thing on the off chance it ever becomes commercially viable.



So... Why does this count as news? It seems like just the status quo for the past six years, nothing new here.

Access Microsoft

[Doc Ruby]

Access, the company now stifling innovation with the dormant BeOS code, is also the Japanese mobile phone corporate giant that bought out PalmOS, lying about offering a smartphone running Linux with a PalmOS GUI/compatibility layer.

Funny how they keep spending money on OS'es that they never profit from. Their mission seems to be to kill OS'es that have a chance to innovate around Microsoft's monopoly. I wonder whether their license to deploy Windows phones in Japan was contingent on doing that kind of Microsoft dirty work, perhaps even secretly funded (or subsidized) by Microsoft.

Re:Access Microsoft

[Doc Ruby]

The other big case the Clinton Department of Justice won against a monopoly/cartel was against Big Tobacco. It's now coming to light that Bush's Justice Department interfered with the followthru. As part of their now obvious process of coporatizing the Justice Department to serve monopolies like Microsoft. I expect it's only a matter of time before we learn how Bush deliberately ditched the MS monopoly judgement. His favorite lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, got his lobbyist career started at Preston, Gates, Bill Gates III's father's law firm. I expect there's a lot more to the story, all bad.

Re:Owner of the code - but they're not using it!

[Britz]

Actually BeOS went down because of the lack of apps. Adobe never ported Photoshop and Steinberg never ported Cubase even though there was talk about both. Maybe a company with a fruit as its logo had something to do with the Photoshop port never coming through, but I dunno, maybe some other Slashdotter can shed some light on the history of BeOS.

With the current free software that rivals proprietary software in both quality and features in many fields and that seems to be made for porting fringe operating systems seem to stand a much better chance. Just look at Ubuntu. Personally I am running Debian as my desktop OS.

Parent may not be right about Access being responsible for the downfall of BeOS, but now, that BeOS actually may have a chance (I heard that Firefox was ported for example) they may be responsible for it never coming back.