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Trick question?

Nope - apparently just ignorant bastard.

Have you been on OSNews long? BeOS (and Haiku) news has always been given importance here, and rightly so. I have no idea what your pet OS is, but I'm damn sure not going to slam it just to get a reaction, like you seem to be doing here. Please do us all a favor and crawl back under your bridge.

I still have a BeOS 5 Pro installation that I boot into every once in a while.

Then again, I also have an OS/2 box I use fulltime and I like Apple ][ games via Appler, so...

Seriously, though. If you can install it, it's still a nice OS. I managed to get a copy of Firefox 2.0.12 for it, *and* I managed to install it and get it to run, so the platform can't be all bad.

This might sound funny, but I think it's a great idea to just release the docs as reference material only.

In the future, Access may want to sell off the BeOS IP it purchased to another company, and who is to say what that company would wish to do with such property?

This way, Haiku continues on to make a clean room reimplementation of the BeOS with no chance of a law suite.

Am I making sense?

It's theorically true, but I think the BeOS IP value is nowadays pretty much equal to zero.

In addition, as Haiku is BSD-style licenced, a commercial variant of Haiku could be possible.
(Access could actually merge sourcecodes and sell that as BeOS but the task is probably immense for a microscopic business case...)

(BTW, I have a real paper BeBook, standing on a shelf neareby !)

I don't agree. Although I understand that it seems that way, all you need to take are two prime examples of where BeOS got it right, and where the rest of the industry is still playing catch up. Parallel processing and the BFS.


I never thought of it that way, well said. Although I don't think Access is ever going to try that, who knows what might happen in the future? would be a pretty nasty thing to try on the Haiku devs though.


Oh, man! I'm green with envy! Gonna have a look on eBay, see if I can pick one up!

If we are flexing our BeOS book collections, I have the Be Developer's guide (aka the Be book), Be advanced topics, Programming thr Be operating system, The BeOS bible, Practicle file system design (deals with bfs design) and Koch Media BeOS user guide. Also have a Gobe productive manual too ;-)

Edited 2008-03-26 20:05 UTC

I think it's a pretty safe bet that ACCESS is not going to be bringing out a competitor to Haiku. We've got other things to do, we're busy, busy, busy.

David "Lefty" Schlesinger
Director, Open Source Technologies
ACCESS Co., Ltd.