A new development in the Zeta legality issue: BeOSFrance says to have written confirmation from Jean-Louis Gassee that to JLG's knowledge, YellowTAB did not have an agreement with Palmsource [French]. My French isn't exactly what it should be (I should've paid more attention during high school), but with the help of Adam and others we managed to translate the most important bit: "The impropriety and absence of an agreement between yellowTAB and PalmSource (at the time, still the owner of the BeOS IP) had been confirmed to me in writing by the person best-placed to talk about it in those circumstances: Jean-Louis Gassee."
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Member since:2005-12-31
Thanks Sogabe. You got it right on.
It was later on that they claimed to have lots of developers and some would have been part time workers. And, doesn't mean all were receiving a salary either; some might have been free, just working to help move Zeta along ( and included in the count to make yT look big ).
As for the dollar sign. In Canada & USA that is how we do values that represent currency ( money value ), but I just checked and noticed that with the Euro, no dollar sign is used at all. ( ie: we say $10,000 or sometimes to make it more clear $10,000 CDN, $10,000 US, etc, but now I realize that Europe does not utilize the dollar sign, ie: 10,000 Euro ).
And still, I haven't heard any explanation for Bernd's Castle ( or maybe that was just a coincidence after all and not related to the money he made off Zeta??? ).
Edited 2007-04-12 22:51
Member since:2006-04-27
As a matter of fact, does not 2001 count either. YellowTab appeared in the scene on 2002 as *distributors* of BeOS; you can see their first press release from early 2002 on the web archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020114173651/www.yellowtab.com/pressre...
Interestingly, the company was called yellowTAB i.G., and not yellowTAB GmbH (could this be the company the Bernd claims has rights to ZETA?). Also take a look at this post from July 31, 2002:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020802153708/http://www.yellowtab.com/
Here, yellowTAB i.G. is described as "the leading commercial distributor of BeOS in Germany" and this is where the *code name* "Zeta" first appeared, IIRC.
Scroll down, and note the *roadmap* where the "BeOS Home- and Developeredition" were to be ready for Nov. 2002, and the DeluxeEdition for January of 2003. Ah, and the Developeredition was going to include GCC 3.xx. 
In the end, there was only one version of Zeta (not three), and the first official (non-RC) release was only shipped in July of 2005:
http://web.archive.org/web/20051020074348/www.yellowtab.com/news/ar...
In the meantime, yT had been selling buggy release candidates at 99 euros a pop to unsuspecting TV shopping viewers in German as a replacement for Windows.
Looking at the history of yellowTAB, is it quite easy to tell that the company had a very short period of prosperity and fast growth (late 2004 - 2005), mainly driven by sales on TV and the RTL shop, and that it was only during this short period that they probably had to sustain considerable engineering resources. So, Mr. Invincible Cow, saying that they had to pay a full staff of 20 or more engineers for six years is quite a stretch, to say the least. 
Member since:2007-03-29
but now I realize that Europe does not utilize the dollar sign, ie: 10,000 Euro ).
... or rather 10,000 €. I also stumbled over your euro-dollars, because I (as probably most Europeans) percive the $ as the symbol of a specific currency, not a universal sign for "money", just as the "£" means "pound sterling" and, well the € for Euros.
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Member since:
2006-04-27
> Add that for 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006...
Sorry to disappoint you, but your numbers are way blown out of proportion. yT did not have that many engineers over such a long period of time. It was in 2005 (when they started selling Zeta over RTL) that they claimed to have around 20 or so engineers, and not all of them were full time. That peak did not last long, as their sales on RTL lasted only a few months, and before the end of the year 2005, there were already rumors of engineers leaving the company for lack of payment.
So, at most, they may have had 20 engineers in the year 2005, but certainly not in 2006, and during the period 2001 - 2004 yT was obviously operating with a very small crew (before they moved to their biggers offices).
If yT did in fact sell 100K licenses as they have once claimed, then one has to wonder what the heck they did with the all that revenue.