Star Palm Acquires Be's IP, Be is Closing Down
Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 16th Aug 2001 17:54 UTC, submitted by Irfon-Kim Ahmad
BeOS & Derivatives This Press Release today is everywhere on the net. Palm is acquiring Be's technology, hardware and their software engineering force for $11 million USD. Please notice that they are buying Be's IP, not the company itself.
Our take: Well, at least something happened. I think it is safe to assume that Be will be now closed down (the closing down of the company is pretty much certain, according to the press release "Be's board of directors has approved the transaction, and the winding-up of Be's operating business following the closing") as they now own nothing (except if they want to enter another markets or.. become car or pencil dealers). Being myself a BeOS advocate, user and developer for several years now, I am sad to see this twist and what it probably means for the BeOS. While Palm has not stated what they want to do with Be's technology, my guess is that they do not care about the BeOS and the Desktop OS world. Slashdot has it right this time: I believe Palm mostly bought the engineering force, to create something new and continue make their living in the PDA market. Palm is entering the Desktop through BeOS you say? Yeah, right. I will believe it when I see it. In my mind, the only way to see a BeOS R6 is if there will be a third party licensee that is interesting to license BeOS and do something productive with it (assuming that Palm will be willing to allow that). Palm does not have what it takes to drive a desktop OS neither BeOS can be open sourced (too much licensed source code all over the place).
Update: Not a crucial update to the story, just trying to add a bit of spicy humour. We just had an anonymous sending us in this picture, while BeDoper has its regular, humouristic take on the latest happenings in the Be world.
Update2: ZDNews writes: "However, Palm said it has no plans to further develop the Be operating system as a standalone OS."
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It really doesn't look good for BeOS does it? Having used it for quite a while, I've come to love it. I even use it as my main OS - it does everything I need, and does it well! I've held out more hope than most people. I *truly* believe that with a little effort BeOS could become a mainstream OS. But, it would need to have money pumped into the development of it, money that Palm just doesn't have right now. I'm still clinging to the last slightest string of hope that Palm decides to carefully attempt to enter the desktop OS market, they've said they want to enter new markets, but with their current financial situation, and the fact that the desktop OS market is fierce and dominated by Microsoft, I don't think we'll see that any time soon! I still don't understand what people don't see in BeOS, from my point of view (if I was a company and had the funding) I'd put as much effort as I could into BeOS, it's the only OS, that in my mind *could* pose a real threat to MS's dominance...if only it had the backing it needs ;) I'm not sure what I'm going to do now. I think I'll stick with BeOS for as long as I can, it's still a joy to use, but it'll be hard knowing that the OS has no future right now...*sigh*, I'd better stop before this get's too mushy! ;)