“One possible concession by Microsoft in the proposed AntiTrust settlement has come too late to save the company which pressed hardest for its inclusion: Be, Inc.” “I’m always cautious around what these guys ‘promise'”, Be’s CEO Jean-Louis Gassée told TheRegister via email at the weekend. JLG believes that the restriction that DOJ posed to Microsoft regarding the bootloader issue, can boost Linux and *BSD. Our Take: Funny really, JLG says that this concession can boost Linux and *BSD, but he fails to mention his own child, the (abandoned) BeOS.
Gassée Believes MS Bootloader Concession Could Boost Linux/BSD
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Hey maybe the shareholders will vote against the IP sale to Palm and with this outcome Gassée will reconcider releasing BEOS 6.0.
If not, it’s just too much of a shame no one will be able to see it.
I do guess there are a lot of you out there who wants to dual boot (to play games, admit it;)), but anyone who runs one computer, one OS, like I do, this is really not an issue. Linux/*BSD/etc runs just fine if you completely remove windows anyways.
Eugenia lives to troll again, boring, change the vinyl dude.
Don’t be bitter man, it’s not worth it.
The only thing Be did was sack your old man.. get over it!
the problem with gasse is that he can’t see that he is not the best to run Be, he never was. I don’t say he should have quit the company he founded, just remove itself from the direction.
I vote no on Be/Palm deal. I still think Be could bounce back with a BeOS R6. Apple app need to be redone anyway, 95% of the game devellopment in the world is on console now anyway and XP will drive consumer mad in the short run.
From what i saw Be have to pay around 7M and they will be dept free. This is not a lot of money. And if the DoJ would protect OS like BeOS with the right mesure you would see LOT of investor ready to pay that 7M$. After all the OS market is just BIG, what is to take a 7M$ risk when it can pay 10000 time more in the next 10 year.
Prorietary OS is the real thing in my mind. OpenOS are just good because chip maker allow us to the data that allow making compiler and other tool. The day processor go the black box way …. bye bye open software.
The burn rate of Be was 1.5M/month. this mean they have 15,000 BeOS R6/month each month (or 180,000/year) to break even. Some company alone pay more than this in window licence!
The DoJ have no spine and Gassé also have no spine to not go after M$. I still don’t beleive he recommand us to sell our share.
If you think (like JLG) that Be can’t come back, just look at sega. They lost 400M$/year for 4 year in a row! Now they are #1 on the japan topix score board and the stock always go up each day. What was the magic, the executive acknoleged for their incompetance and lack of skill with honor. JLG is a chauvinistic french men, all those that did make trade with france know that taking responsability for them is like asking them to have emotion like a vulcain.
Be Computing is looking into their legal option against MSFT. Saying that the concessions in the settlement would help BeOS “might” come back to haunt them later. I would think their best option would be to present BeOS as completely destroyed by MSFT anticompetitive actions.
Since the concessions are in the settlement it would seem to be an admission that their previous actions were injurious to competition. This goes a way towards making Be’s case. If it does help these others (Linux/BSD) then it will prove the point.
What the stockholders do with the money they might recover is another issue. I would like to think JLG might give it another shot if he had the resources.
AlienSoldier, No need to be racist, just because hes French doesnt auotmatically make him bad, although as an Englishman im not fond of them!!
It’s obviously no secret that MS locks out other OS’s with its restrictive trade practices. The reason it has been able to do this is because of the fear that it places in the OEM’s minds because of the lack of any realistic alternative to run Windows programs, and those OEMs can’t take the risk as long as the alternative OS they want to install can’t run them.
I guess we’d be faced with much the same issue as Be, but we have worked around it in some other ways. Firstly we retain any MS formatted volumes – BeOS had the risk of having to create a BeFS volume to do its thing. Also we have the ability to boot from DOS or even a floppy disk. I frankly haven’t got to the stage where OEM’s turn us down beacuse of presigned licensing deals but given the expressions of interest I have received, they are only waiting till the right alternative comes along.
Eventually, the industry is going to have to build up the courage to say “no” to MS. MS is like a spoilt child always getting its own way and if it doesn’t learn to act as a mature player rather than a bully, it will eventually die from its own selfishness because society as a whole won’t tolerate it. If it wants to preserve its longevity, it must eventually play by the rules. Without reasonable competition in the market place, the computer scene will only stagnate and head into a dark age – we see the warning signs of this already happening – OS development and CPU design risk getting locked in a time warp. MS may control things in the short term and milk the market for all it can get, but that can’t last forever. History has shown computer companies come & computer companies go. IBM was big once, and so was Digital. Their time will come, mark my words.
Each era in the history of computing has been marked by the killer app in the very broad sense. For IBM, it was the introduction of computing to business – they were kings of the mainframe. For Digital they opened up computing to the academic and research world – they were kings of the minicomputer. For Apple, they were kings of the hobby and personal micro scene. For MS it was the small business computer, and they’ve becomes kings of the desktop. The Internet has grown their market to reach “Mum & Dad” computing. I am not entirely confident that they can remain kings in that arena.
Each of the previous kings has been unable to adapt to the newer paradigm, despite seeing the scenery change before their eyes and being aware of the change happening. I believe a situation will come along that despite being plain before their eyes, MS’s business model or its capabilities will be just unable to adapt to. Interestingly I think the scenery changes when the market needs something that the current king can’t or doesn’t want to deliver at a reasonable market price. I believe MS has crossed that threshold. The founders have built a company with a financial appetite that is likely to cause its own market to turn upon it.
We see the seeds of this with their newer “leased” style licensing schemes. While leasing schemes are not in themselves bad, it is their place in the food chain which I think is wrong. For example, say you need a car. You don’t typically lease a car from the manufacturer – the consumer wants the choice to be able to lease or buy it outright, and that’s where finance companies or banks or whatever come in between the manufacturer and the consumer. The car manufacturer just wants to manufacture cars, and they are built with a given practical life which based on price and what the market will bear, and keep their manufacturing machine rolling. If they were lumbered with having to deal with financing issues and leasing, they would be in deep trouble as its not their core business. MS should beware of what they are trying to do with .NET and their licensing deals and other stuff they’re getting into lately. It has a clear track record of not giving enough care towards security in its products, and so where money is concerned if there as security issues, consumers are going to be burned. There will be a backlash. Unless they become the Bank of Microsoft
Who knows what it will take to push MS off their perch. I don’t think it can be anything that attacks them head on – they are far too well fortified for that to happen. It is likely to be a paradigm shift in the industry which will do this. A new killer app which needs a fresh way of thinking, fresh hardware, fresh software and a licensing schemes that MS can’t adapt to.
Is it Open Source? I don’t think so. Open source has been with us since the beginning of computing, and I think it will always be with us in one form or another. It forms an important part of the fabric of the IT industry, but by its nature can’t serve as its backbone. Real innovation and real hardware costs real money and the Open Source can’t generate the kind of revenue that’s needed to really make a difference. Most Open Source is fundamentally a volunteer effort, and although volunteer movements are an essential part of society, they ultimately need the underpinning of the fruits of society and the IT industry to exist.
Don’t ask me what the paradigm shift will be. I just don’t know yet. I think it has something to do with computing for the masses if we follow the trends in computing history. Any attempt to capitalize on a paradigm shift before it’s time will usually fail which is why we haven’t seen the ASP market or the IA market emerge fully yet. I think mobile computing and ubiquitous internetworking are also key areas to watch carefully.
P
Seems to me that the performance requirements for the client side and server side are asymmetrically related, and a version of Linux that can be configured like UNIX on the server, and QNX or Beos on the client would be optimal. The Linux people should start thinking about designing low cost reference client boxes. The only thing MS-Win is optimal for is perpetuating the IT economy in the USA. The PC makers will kowtow to the goal of pushing consumer IT sales for the sake of such regardless of whatever licensing restrictions have been removed, or the merits of a client side next-gen Linux.
i for one would love to see the mythical/apocryphal BeOS r6 and hope it will provide me with enough driver support so that i can finally use the BeOS as a serious enviroment and not just the playing of mp3’s backwards (as cool as that is). an end to the whole MS dominace would be great and for me as a musician (which is why i got interested in BeOS) it would be a relief to be able to work in a secure crash free enviroment. yes, i know XP is out but its a heck of a price for an upgrade, and it brings with it a load of security issues: .NET for one.
“Me too!”…hehe But seriously, an OGL and BONE-enabled BeOS6 would bring me much happiness. I could finally take BeOS seriously enough as a low-end server solution for my tiny home LAN…primarily for serving out mp3’s. Until we hear more from Palm or BeUnited or OpenBeOS, however, I would not get my hopes up too much in terms of desktop solutions. Without some long-term committment and a good road map from any of the above groups, I doubt developers will spend too much time on a BeOS6 that will remain stagnant. Eugenia, without disclosing any secret details, are Palm and BeUnited still in comunicado? Is there progress?
(expensivelesbian, i love that name!)
If Palm was really only interested in the BeIA engineers, then I think Be Inc. should sell them, pay off their debts and release R6 with an agressive campaign to win users. I still think an excellent way to go would be to make games/applications that boot off of the CD and run, no matter what platform you have. If you run Windows or Linux or QNX on an x86 box, or a PPC box, just stick in the disc, let it create a small, virtual BFS volume (ala Personal Edition) where it’ll store system specific information and save games, and play away!
i would but the new os…
it would be nice f beos could use the drivers from linux… but that will never happon… and i am happy to say that i will be getting rid of windows soon as i hate MShit
all i need is a way to play games and have linux at the same time… that makes me happy… now if i can only figure how to get the ftpd to work right
(“…there is only Zuul.”)
Seriously, unless I’m radically misunderstanding the situation, Be is almost completely out of money and virtually out of options. They have no sales and marketing department and are running (what’s left of?) the engineering group in what amounts to a life-support mode to satisfy the legal requirements of the assets sale. They are no longer, in accountant-speak, a “going concern.”
No offense, guys, but wake up and smell the coffee. The choice is between selling the assets to Palm and disappearing, or not selling the assets to Palm and disappearing anyway. In the first scenario, it’s (at least statistically) possible that someone could buy or license the rights to the desktop OS from Palm. In the second scenario, those rights are tied up in bankruptcy court, and someone would have to make a successful bid for them. (This is a game anyone who remembers the Commodore-Amiga saga should recall.)
You want to “save” BeOS, consider working with BeUnited–it’s my understanding they’ve been talking to Palm, and if the sale to Palm falls through I bet they’ll try to get together a bid on those assets in bankruptcy court.
as cheeky and witty as Be Inc could be, it is not my concern if they challange MS or fold or ressurect themselves from the dead. all i care is that the technology that is “BeOS” is continued, by hook or by crook. blueOS, beunited, openbeos. whatever it takes to keep an alternative, and by that i mean (well for me the non progammer-geek type) a non-linux solution. i’d be AMAZED if Be did challange MS, but then maybe it could pay for another gassee adventure? i don’t know. just hope that lovely OS doesn’t die off. realistically, i’d love to see a r6, you never know, stranger things happen. maybe macOS will come to x86? anything that stops this stranglehold that MS has. the point is not to want MS out of the scene, as they have a purpose like anyone else, just, not hogging the scene. so, i guess, be like the british, and support the underdog. christ, its late, and i’m getting tipsy.
I am talking at length with OpenBeOS people to work out if a BeOS clone could be done using the PetrOS kernel. The plan is to create a kernel driver module for PetrOS that would export a BeOS style kernel layer. We will also be creating an ELF loader.
Many of the PetrOS OS features match BeOS features – we think the match is fairly good so far. Anything that’s missing can probably be built fairly easily, or emulated efficiently.
P
expensivelesbian, with apple releasing the core of osx as open source (darwin), there is an x86 product under development that has a lot of macos in it. this is probably as close as you will ever get to macos for x86. if you’re interested take a look at http://gnu-darwin.org
i would also have to agree that i don’t really care how it happens, but i want beos development to continue.
This guy just SUCKS !
He had some (or more) possibilities to grow/fusionate Be Inc. – due to his arrogance, all failed.
Any OS producing software company would lick their fingers to get such a promisin’ OS.
Bringing in Mr. ‘Newton’ Sakoman (& kicking some good coders meanwhile), was the 2nd step to suicide.
Man – this Guy is needed for BeOS like fungus on my feet !!!!
thanks chris. i’ve heard for a while about apple and their hinted movings into the realm of x86, but i thought they were put off as they could not make their money back from hardware sales. but, thanks for the link. truth be told, i’d rather have beos in one form or another but hey, lets hope the microsoft product pushing down peoples throats gets what should be an equal reaction. then, the paradigm shift might happen. anyway, here’s to beos
Heh,.. expensivelesbian — that name *does* rock.
I think Dirk is mostly right. BeOS (in any future form it takes) needs JLG like it needs a hole in the head. I don’t pay much attention to what he says these days, after him selling BeOS down the river and all.
Btw Dirk, better have that fungus looked at.
hi there
hope i didn’t come across the wrong way. i’d probably agree that maybe a breath of fresh managerial air is what the BeOS needs, when i said “finance another gassee adventure”, i meant something other than Be. god knows what he’d get up to. you can make good zinfandels in california, but then he could just go home and make better wine.
If THE man who brought us the BeOS isn’t even mentioning his OS as a contender, we can all write it off. I LOVE the BeOS and it pains me to think of all that potential just going to waste, but I’m not going to put myself through another Amiga saga. Like Cringley said, until someone has the balls to take on Microsoft head-on, no one is going to make their product more than a niche in the market. It is apparent by his statement that JLG is tired and does not want to put forth the effort to fight Microsoft with the BeOS.
For those of you who have read this far, I’m not saying stop using the BeOS. I’m saying don’t spend your time waiting for another BeOS release from Be, Palm, or JLG, because it isn’t going to happen. Be tried to “play nice” with Microsoft using the BeOS and when that didn’t work right away, they tried to get in on the ground floor of a market (Internet Appliances) they practically had to create themselves. What a tragic mistake. We all know that the BeOS is better than any version of Windows. Too bad Be and JLG didn’t know it.
It is all well and good to talk about what should have been or what needs to be done, but we (the users/enthusiasts) aren’t going to change anything (which makes this post pretty much pointless, but I have to get it off my chest). And although there are some very dedicated people out there trying to keep the BeOS alive in one form or another, it will take more than talented programmers and nothing short of a marketing miracle to make the BeOS a common feature of users’ desktops.