“Palm Inc was considering Linux as the foundation of the next-generation PalmOS as recently as last spring, sources tell us. Palm eventually acquired Be Inc’s development team last August, but internal discussions on the viability of a Linux-based handheld OS were taking place as recently as fifteen months ago. These were squashed by the lawyers, who concluded that Palm couldn’t reconcile the GPL with the in house view of intellectual property. [..] Palm is not using the cut-down embedded version BeOS, BeIA, which was targetted at the NatSemi x86 system on a chip, but a ground-up OS for ARM.” Read the report at TheRegister.
Palm was Considering Linux for its Next-Gen OS
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http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25513.html
if you don’t let them fuck you in the ass nicely.. they are gonna ram a truck up there.. so either way you’re screwed.. time to put all those unemployed linux people back in the saddle!
Do the ex-Be guys use BeOS at all in their development of Palm’s next OS? (Is it on their workstations, etc.)
There are some points that i can’t let go here.
1) you can’t buy a person so palm did not pay 11 million
for engineers. Last i heard slavery/human trading was outlawed in the US albeit a bit late by world standards.
2) You don’t pay 11 million for the right to offer someone a job that they can refuse. This is a joke. it is absurd.
3) you pay 11 million so that that person you just hired can infringe on his former employer’s (be) patents/IP.
4) Of course they won’t use beos or beia as is. neither worked on an arm and neither was really designed for low power consumption.
5) They will use Beos and Beia Intellectual property and technology because they know it works. Moreover, they paid for it and it rocks.
6)They will never license beos or beia because they want to use aspects of the technolgy though not as beos or beia.
Do you think they’ll start from scratch not reuse anything they have even though 10 years of design and testing was put into that technology..NO. Wait no, they’d rather base their OS on linux or symbian. I don’t think so.
Even Gassee said during the shareholder meeting that selling to palm was the only way to save the technology. So he has done that. Will it be beos or beia? no. Will it use the IP and technology from beos and beia..yes…yes yes.
The technology that was be, as opposed to beos itself, has finally found itself a home. unwanted on the power PC, x86 and the ATT chip it now has a home on the ARM. MS can’t bully or control ARM and its not made by one company (intel). It is licensed to and made by many. Maybe this home will stick.
The GPL would have killed Palm and it’s partners! Palm can still use embedded Linux if they wish although they won’t need to.
Although Palm Solutions is the main source of revenue at this time, I think that will change in the long run. As more hardware vendors get into the handheld business, PalmSource will bring home the bacon.
ciao
yc
>>>>you can’t buy a person so palm did not pay 11 million
for engineers. Last i heard slavery/human trading was outlawed in the US albeit a bit late by world standards.
Tell that to Major League Baseball, NBA, NHL and NFL.
>>>>You don’t pay 11 million for the right to offer someone a job that they can refuse. This is a joke. it is absurd.
That’s why there is stipulation in the contract that in order for the deal to close, a minimum number of designated engineers must sign up to work for Palm.
>>>you pay 11 million so that that person you just hired can infringe on his former employer’s (be) patents/IP.
It’s not Be’s IP anymore — Be Inc. sold all their IP to Palm.
>>>Of course they won’t use beos or beia as is. neither worked on an arm and neither was really designed for low power consumption.
>>>They will use Beos and Beia Intellectual property and technology because they know it works. Moreover, they paid for it and it rocks.
If they are not designed for pda usage (CPU/power management), then it doesn’t work and it doesn’t rock. Witness the evilla.
>>>>They will never license beos or beia because they want to use aspects of the technolgy though not as beos or beia.
Didn’t yellowtab or some other people get an asking price of 2 million dollars?
“>>>>you can’t buy a person so palm did not pay 11 million
for engineers. Last i heard slavery/human trading was outlawed in the US albeit a bit late by world standards.
Tell that to Major League Baseball, NBA, NHL and NFL.”
Athletes have contracts and you can buy out or sell the contract, not the player. Moreover, the money in the contract goes to the player and his managers. Palm did not pay Be engineers 11 million and i sincerely doubt that be had a major league style contract if any on its people. Moreover, even if they did those contracts would be null and void after tha Palm purchase. So no you can’t buy people. The year is 2002 not 1502.
“That’s why there is stipulation in the contract that in order for the deal to close, a minimum number of designated engineers must sign up to work for Palm.”
was this stipulation in the contract? How long? Do they work one year, two years, three. Ever heard of a right to work state (which i believe california is). Try this in NY and you won’t get too far. My employer tried it on me. A five year contract, he wanted. In the end his own lawyer shot it down because it is quite difficult to force an employee to work when he or she does not want to .
The evilla had problems because of other issue which have been discussed here to death. Also, they are building a new os in two years. They need to maximize stability, minimize development time, etc. They won’t reinvent the wheel if they don’t have to. To do so would be inefficient. I am sure they will use ideas and aspects of the existing technology base while adding news ones.
>>>>Moreover, the money in the contract goes to the player and his managers.
But that’s not what sports team do when they trade players. They trade for future draft picks, monetary considerations, other players — those don’t go to the players. Consider the 11 million dollars as monetary considerations or future draft picks.
Part of 11 million dollars benefit the engineers too — Be Inc. waived the rights of their non-competes. Palm could have paid 10K to each of the engineers and then the engineers paid that 10K to Be Inc. for the waiving of the non-competes. They don’t do that probably because then the engineers have to pay income taxes on that money.
The stipulation is in the deal, I don’t know the length of the employment contract. But Palm doesn’t need a 5 year contract, if they can’t get PalmOS 5 to market in 12 months time (nov 2001 – nov 2002) — then Palm Inc. is over as a company.
You are falling into the same trap that beos fan got into when they talked about how beos is perfect for internet appliance. There is not much of fundamental technologies in BeOS that are valuable in a pda. You can’t show multiple videos/mp3 in a pda — the cpu won’t handle multiple playing of files, there is not enough memory for caching videos/mp3, and even 3G is too slow to stream multiple videos. There is no need for a 64 bit journaling file system (evilla used a compressed file system instead of BeFS).
Palm was willing to spend 250 million dollars for Extended Systems (maker of enterprise level software) before the deal was cancelled and Palm paid a pitiful 11 million dollars for BeOS. Look where their priorities are. PalmOS 6 (or whatever the number is) will be concentrated on the development of enhancements to PalmOS on the enterprise level front (an area not a BeOS/BeIA specialty).
I essentially agree with Ryan. However, I do believe that Be Inc. had special contracts with a few of it’s key engineers. Those contracts probably prevented the Be Engineers from going to Palm, Apple, Microsoft or elsewhere on their own.
So, while Be did not specifically sell the Engineers or their contracts, the engineers went with the OS / IP.
There is a saying: “The dog comes with the flees”. Well in this case I guess “The flees (Be Engineers) went to Palm with the dogs (BeOS, BeIA). Because theses dogs would not survive with out the flees.
Rest assured that BeOS/BeIA technology powers PalmOS 5. They could not have completed the first release of a commercial ready OS in such a short period of time with out BeOS/BeIA. Remenber how BeOS was ported to Intel? They got a few Intel engineers to assist in porting the kernel then the rest of the code was quickly ported since it’s very portable code. Something similar probably took place at Palm except they did not have to port the whole OS.
ciao
yc
From the register article.
“Palm isn’t using the cut-down embedded version BeOS, BeIA, which was targetted at the NatSemi x86 system on a chip, but a ground-up OS for ARM.”
Ground-up OS for ARM doesn’t say alot, but it seems that porting stuff from beos/beia is very remote.
I find it difficult to believe that any significant portion of Be code is in the new PalmOS. And what there is would probably be unrecognizable to users.
OBOS is the way for BeOS users to go, not PalmOS. JLG is now at Palm because he needed a new job, not because he’s got any secret plans to bring back BeOS.
Very well said Michael A. Clem. I agree 100%.
ARMs instruction set does not differ so much from x86 instruction set. So I think that it is quite possible that BeIA/BeOS parts will come to future PalmOS versions. But I also believe that there won’t be a BeOS-Version from Palm. OpenBeOS is the future for BeOS.
LoCal
Why Palm didn’t license BeOS to BeUnited. It has nothing to loose, and might gain something.
you can’t buy engineers from Be’s shareholders, creditors and management. In most take overs of this nature a few key top executives must stay (but not always). As YC put it the fleas might come with the dog so that might account for others. But ultimately, most engineers have absolutely no obligation. The responsibility for retention in a takeover is the obligation of the buyer not the seller. It is Palm’s responsibility to provide incentives for the mass of be’s engineers to stay with the exception of a few key leaders who will have contracts.
Moreover, if you really just want the engineers then hire them after they are unemployed or send a recruiter to hire them during be’s last pathetic days. You don’t need 11 million to do that. Not to mention the fact that non-competes do not matter anymore when a company is deceased as be was to be.
My point is very simple. That 11 million was spent to allow palm to use patents and technologies that were held by be.
perhaps they will design a new operating system, two years seems bit short though. Yes they wanted the engineers. Nonetheless, the 11 million is cover money so that those those engineers can legally use technologies and concepts that were held by be, inc.
the concepts/technology of things like multitasking and the way be handled media are sure to find their way in there. Notice it might not be the exact same code. I am talking about the concepts and technology in a broader sense. Kind of like the fact that qualcomm has to pay heddy lemar’s estate (i believe it is heddy lemar not sure) money because she invented spread spectrum. CDMA is a kind of spread spectrum.
And once again. you can not buy people.
> ARMs instruction set does not differ so much from x86
> instruction set. So I think that it is quite possible
> that BeIA/BeOS parts will come to future PalmOS versions
There is very little resembles between the x86 and ARM instruction set apart from the obvious fact that x86 is a CISC architecture while the ARM is a RISC architecture (although not pure, it has some CISC elements). Just to mention some of the differences:
x86
—
Orthogonal instr: No
Registers: 8×32 bit (with special purposes)
Instruction size: Variable (expanding opcodes)
Instruction modes: Many
ARM
—
Orthogonal instr.: Yes
Registers: 16×32-bit (15 general purpose + PC)
Instruction size: 32-bit fixed (16-bit if in Thumb mode)
Address modes: Few (load-store architecture)
Not to forget the fact that all ARM instructions are conditional thus enabling very compact code for small control-structures.
/Jesper
First a quibble: JLG isn’t at Palm. He’s the CEO of Computer Access Technology Corp. (CATC), a company that makes “protocol analyzers”–datacom testing equipment. It seems to be about as far from what he was doing in his previous jobs as he could get without leaving the technology field completely.
Gassee is on the board of PalmSource, but his new job isn’t with Palm.
Ryan’s analysis makes sense to me–the $11M was to buy Be’s intellectual property. In a sense they were buying the engineering team, though–in the same sense that in most corporate buyouts the new owners extend job offers to existing employees they’d like to keep. Unless the employee really hates the new employer and is very confident of their employability elsewhere, they’re going to transition to the new company if it’s offered. At any rate, when someone says “they’ve bought the engineering team,” we all understand that this isn’t to be taken in the same sense as “they’ve bought the engineering building.”
I’m pretty sure Ryan’s also correct in saying California’s a “right to work” state. At least in Florida, this means that either employee or employer can terminate an employment agreement without cause and with no advance warning (which we cynically call the “right to fire” clause). But it also means that any employment agreement which tries to limit an employee’s right to work without a quid pro quo arrangement is unenforceable. My current company has such an agreement with me written into their contract–I’m not supposed to work “in the industry” for six months after leaving them–but because they haven’t offered me anything as compensation for that, it’s not an enforceable agreement. If they were going to pay me not to work for six months, then it would be. (Most companies rely on employees not knowing that, or figuring that employees aren’t going to want to spend the money to fight a legal threat even if it’s ultimately found groundless. In my case, I expect my company to be too busy going under to have the resources to fight….)
If the GPL was all the stopped Palm filching Linux, why didn’t they simply do what Apple did and filch a BSD flavour instead? That would have avoided those horrid licensing issues.
Na – there’s gotta be other reasons why they didn’t take the UNIX root. Perhaps being taken over by BeOS was simply too good an opportunity to miss?
I agree!
If you can get two great OSes at a great price, along with most of the key engineers that built the thing, that’s pretty hard to beat. They probably got the BeBox design as well.
The future is not always easy to predict correctly. I never thought that Be would have shifted focus from desktops to Internet Appliances but they did. Now, I think that Palm will release a desktop and tablet OS someday, probably before OBOS is completed. Time will tell.
It’s interesting that the CEO of Palm Solutions is from Gateway 2000, a PC and Internet Appliance maker. PalmSource and Solutions can only grow so much in the handheld market without branching into other markets.
Frankly, I think the future of BeOS and BeIA along with other operating systems is in the hands of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
ciao
yc
yc,
good point. Palm’s growth will ultimately involve expansion beyond a simple PDA model. What that will be is anyone’s guess. I just sure hope that they also look beyond cell phones because that market is proving to be a real dog, and one with staying power at it.
That also means that whatever they making now for an os 6 better be expandable beyond a simple PDA or phone.
> If the GPL was all the stopped Palm filching Linux, why didn’t they simply do what Apple did and filch a BSD flavour instead?
Because there is no BSD OS that does embedded systems and ARM. NetBSD might run on ARM, but it is far from behave like an embedded system OS, because it’s not one. The Linux kernel does all that therefore it was the first choice.
>>>Why Palm didn’t license BeOS to BeUnited. It has nothing to loose, and might gain something.
The asking price is 2 million dollars. BeUnited just have to come up with the money.
>>>In most take overs of this nature a few key top executives must stay (but not always).
Nobody senior wanted to stay with Be Inc. — they were under no obligation to stay with Be and they only stayed because Be has given them huge cash bonuses so that the paper work to dissolve the company is done.
>>>>Moreover, if you really just want the engineers then hire them after they are unemployed or send a recruiter to hire them during be’s last pathetic days.
People scatters and the really smart ones would have gotten and accepted job offers from other companies. I mean the cream of the crop already left when they announced the focus changed.
Why would anyone want to have Linux or BSD on PDA ?
Even QNX. Unix is multiuser and multiprocess system.
P in PDA stands for “personal”. And why would you want more than one process at the the time on your PDA ? A task switcher/swapper – yes, but you won’t be running cron daemon to track your appointments.
People do embedded Linux just because Linux has development enviroment ready and it’s free.
“Nobody senior wanted to stay with Be Inc. — they were under no obligation to stay with Be and they only stayed because Be has given them huge cash bonuses so that the paper work to dissolve the company is done.”
so now that the paper work is done, steve sakoman and all those be engineers will just jump ship and leave palm.
Hmm…We’ll just wait and see. i doubt it but this type of scenario (people leaving) is usually why corporations want an asset that is a little more solid than just employees when they buy out a company. People are unreliable.
“The asking price is 2 million dollars. BeUnited just have to come up with the money.”
I don’t get this. Palm must have known that 2 million was several orders of magnitude outside the range of what could be raised by beunited. That one sounds like a buzz off more than a real offer to license the system.
“People scatters and the really smart ones would have gotten and accepted job offers from other companies. I mean the cream of the crop already left when they announced the focus changed.”
Actually the 11 million dollars does nothing to prevent this. Most people could still scatter and leave. 11 million would not guarantee that anyone would stay.
Steve Sakoman
>>>I don’t get this. Palm must have known that 2 million was several orders of magnitude outside the range of what could be raised by beunited. That one sounds like a buzz off more than a real offer to license the system.
Blender has an asking price of 100K dollars. Surely the “best” personal desktop OS is worth more than Blender. Also the 2 million price tag is perfectly aligned with Palm’s SEC filings where they allocated the other 9 million dollars (of the 11 million dollar deal) basically on the employees. It’s not a buzz off — it’s SEC/GAPP accounting.
>>>so now that the paper work is done, steve sakoman and all those be engineers will just jump ship and leave palm.
>>>Actually the 11 million dollars does nothing to prevent this. Most people could still scatter and leave. 11 million would not guarantee that anyone would stay.
Sure Sakoman and others can leave right now, but it really doesn’t matter now because PalmOS 5 is in beta already. You don’t need to “handcuff” Sakoman and the other 50 engineers with a 5 year contract — if Palm doesn’t release gold version of PalmOS 5 by fall, the whole company is history. Nobody at Palm really care whether these people would stay or not, the 11 million dollars guarantee that Palm gets 6-12 months of 50 engineers finishing PalmOS 5 beta.
>>Nobody at Palm really care whether these people would stay or not, …
You’re kidding right?
Operating System engineers are *NOT* easily replacable.
There is still a ton of work to Be done on the OS after the first release. Advanced higher level APIs have to Be developed to deal with a variety of technologies.
How do you think Palm’s partners would feel if all PalmSource engineers walked out?
ciao
yc
>>Why Palm didn’t license BeOS to BeUnited. It has nothing to loose, and might gain something.
I has a lot to lose. Palm had it’s *life* to lose!
Palm OS 5 needed to Be focused on and Palm’s life depends on it.
Considering the current market, BeUnited would still have a hard time selling BeOS to OEMs because of their MSFT contracts. BeUnited->PalmSource would have failed in the desktop market.
I think they made the right decision!
ciao
yc
>>>Operating System engineers are *NOT* easily replacable.
>>>There is still a ton of work to Be done on the OS after the first release. Advanced higher level APIs have to Be developed to deal with a variety of technologies.
From the register article:
“Palm’s problem wasn’t a lack of Programmer-Gods, it was just the Red Queen’s problem: too much to do and not enough engineers.”
Once Palm releases PalmOS 5 this fall, most of the tough work will be done — and departures of those engineers wouldn’t kill them.
>>”Palm’s problem wasn’t a lack of Programmer-Gods, it was just the Red Queen’s problem: too much to do and not enough engineers.”
Well, I see where you get your info from but I remind you that this comes from an old palm engineer, with the old mentality and standards! The new palmsource has new plans, new standards for their new os. If you read about PalmSource’s plans at http://www.palmos.com/platform/os5/ from Nagel and Sakoman you will agree that departure of the Be engineers would be a deadly blow to PalmSource!
ciao
yc
>>>If you read about PalmSource’s plans at http://www.palmos.com/platform/os5/ from Nagel and Sakoman you will agree that departure of the Be engineers would be a deadly blow to PalmSource!
Those are PalmOS 5 plans, and it’s been released as beta now — so it doesn’t really apply to our conversation.
What I have been saying all along remains the same — that Palm spent 11 million BUYING people, not for a long term slave contract (that may or may not be contrary to “right to work”) — but for a guarantee 6-12 months of hard work from those 50 engineers. There is no need to handcuff these people with a long term contract.
Top reasons to deny that palm wanted Be technology
1) Admiting this is admitting that palm itself was lost
2) Be would then be the savior of palm. be was a massive market failure. Do you think the investors want to hear that be technology will be part of the plan to save palm?
3) just imagine the jokes. YOu can almost see some jerk analyst on CNET saying “well Palm is the new be and we all know where the last be ended up? “palm..too late to be.”
4) Be’s investors gave their technology away a significant loss the last thing they want to hear is that Palms new os, which might help palm, has be technology in it, particularly if it saves palm and makes them a lot of money.
5)MS…Though MS will try to kill palm regardless their level of commitment would surely increase if they were to speak much of Be. The coexistenc mentality though must go.
6) The home grown mentality. One sure looks inept when one admits they couldn’t build their own os.
7) The larger the perception distance between palm and be the greater the investor confidence and chance for success.
Did palm want Be’s engineers. YES YES YES. I am sure they are an enormous asset. Did Palm want the technology and IP…My bet is yes. Will they ever speak a word of it. Never.
If you can get two great OSes at a great price, along with most of the key engineers that built the thing, that’s pretty hard to beat. They probably got the BeBox design as well.
Why would Palm want BeBox for? Well, firstly, it is a PDA company. Secondly, BeBox may be cool back then, but it is now outdated and obsolete.
The future is not always easy to predict correctly. I never thought that Be would have shifted focus from desktops to Internet Appliances but they did. Now, I think that Palm will release a desktop and tablet OS someday, probably before OBOS is completed. Time will tell.
Probably not. Mainly because Palm is trying to maintain a stable hold on its key market instead of going into the turf of their largest competitor which is much stronger than them.
It’s interesting that the CEO of Palm Solutions is from Gateway 2000, a PC and Internet Appliance maker. PalmSource and Solutions can only grow so much in the handheld market without branching into other markets.
they would be branching out into hybrid markets like smart phones and set up boxes. Desktops on the other hand is a very hard place to compete, even with the State’s proposal, or even Jackon’s rulling in place.
Frankly, I think the future of BeOS and BeIA along with other operating systems is in the hands of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
Frankly, I think the future of BeOS and BeIA is dead.