There have been many BeOS items in the news lately, not all so good for the BeOS community, though. BeUnited, the organization which tried to license BeOS from Palm, has received today a final answer from Palm: “…we have made a firm decision NOT to license any part of this technology other than that which we incorporate into the Palm OS”. It is already known that the new 32-bit PalmOS will feature some elements of the Be technology, but that OS is built for PDAs, not for the desktop. OSNews learnt that BeUnited will now focus into fully support the Open BeOS and maybe even the BlueOS efforts. YellowTAB, the company that is preparing a BeOS 5 updated version, has no ties to BeUnited, but it is safe to assume that Palm won’t license anything additional (things like BONE or GL, let alone “BeOS 6“) to them either, and we are not sure, judging from Palm’s standpoint today, if they will even be allowed to distribute BeOS NG (their deal is not set in stone yet, Be stopped negotiating with YellowTAB when the time was near to sell their IP to Palm). Read More for David Nagel’s (CEO of the Palm subsidiary, PalmSource, which controls Be’s IP) full email reply.
“Helmar,
We have fully discussed the possibility of licensing the BeOS operating system. At this time we have made a firm decision NOT to license any part of this technology other than that which we incorporate into the Palm OS. There are a variety of reasons for this, both technical and business. We are a small (and new) company that simply must focus all its energy on the principal task of providing great operating systems and other platform
components to the handheld computing and communication device market.
While I understand that this decision may disappoint you, please understand that we make it having thoroughly discussed both the pro’s and con’s of such a decision. It is a final decision.
Sincerely,
David Nagel
President and CEO
PalmSource, Inc.”
Palm Strongly Declines BeOS Licensing to BeUnited
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
R.I.P
BEUNITED.org= OPENBEOS+BLUEOS+YELLOWTAB
That’s it! all together now.
Another OS bites the dust, that’s BeOSR6. Thx for nothing Palm.
Yet another “Focus Shift”. That last one went bad, how will this one (BeUnited) be any better?
The only reason they would decline so hard would be if they were considering releasing their own BeOS-derived OS. Why else would they care, since if not, it would not eat into their profits any way you look at it.
Either that, or they are a bunch of anal a**holes. 😉
They probably just want people to stop bugging them about BeOS.
But, that strong “NO” is more communication than we’ve had from Be in a year and a half, right? Is anyone still in denial about the total lack of a future for BeOS?
– chrish
>The only reason they would decline so hard would be if they were considering releasing their own BeOS-derived OS.
Keep dreaming…
>Why else would they care, since if not, it would not eat into their profits any way you look at it.
Because licensing half-ready OSes (according to the osnews source, BeOS 6 was still beta), is not what they do for living. Palm is not interested. They bought the Be technology, and then, surprisingly for them, they inherited a problem: BeOS and its community. They see the BeOS and its community as a real problem and a pain in the a$$ /me thinks. They want to put an end to it. I think it is more than obvious.
Welcome to the Cutthroat Corporate world of Publicly traded companies…
I stil to this day say that going public and trying to jump on the “BandWagon” Internet Rush of 1998-2000 was Be’s Worst Move. They lost so much touch with the Be Community, the very ones who fed them with Belief and Support, AFTER they went Public. Be then became very quiet and Hush Hush to EVERYTHING that was going on with them with only a few ‘Public’ announcements here and there. I remember how ‘cool’ BeInc was back then, They (Engineers)used to even hang out and post to newsgroups things that were on the drawing board and communicate. The SEC put a Clamp on the VERY advantange they had, being close with its community. I feel that that was the beginning of some sour grapes.
That and them THEN claiming a Refocus to BeIA in Jan of 2000. That was the blow that wouldn’t stop bleeding. Along with their privacy, It was hard to gain momentum and excitement for Be’s wonderfully Awesome Desktop. Developers started jumping ship right after.
The rest is history and them being a Public company now meant they were subject to the inevetible Market Crash (correction) that had to come. The smaller companies with Niche markets were doomed. For a great Documentary of this effect, rent the Documentary/movie Startup.com. Now they got purchased (rescued almost at that point) and Palm has every right to do as they please with their purchase. The market place is a tough playing field. Especially for the players unaccustomed to the cruelty and Survival Dynamics…
Time’s UP, wait has end, either all BeOS efforts (OpenBeOs, BlueOS, Yellotab, BeUnited, GlassElevator, …) unite closely under BeUnited (or some other short of organization) or Belovers are joining OS/2 and Amiga ones.
3 steps to ensuring the global domination of BeOS.
1. Palm goes under and gets bought by a PC manufacturer
Palm = ESCOM
??? = Gateway
??? = Amino + Tao (really cheap around about this time)
??? = Amiga Inc.
2. ???
3. Victory!!!!!!
Chris, exactly! I hope that people in this forum get it and stop dreaming along.
<P>
More than 2 weeks ago, I called Palm and asked to talk to Nagel. I presented
myself as a journalist asking for a mini interview, I did not give the
smallest hint about beunited or about my deeper assosiation with beos. My call was a “professional” one.
<BR>
So, I got through to his secretary, who seemed pretty nice and open. Until I
mentioned the (obviously) tabbooed word: BeOS.
From that point on, she became ‘suspicious’, quick to get rid of me and told me that Nagel is not available at that time, and I better send an email to him. So, I sent an email with 5 questions (questions about beos, the new palmos and the possibility of beos licensing) and I never heard back. Obviously.
honestly, does this announcement come as a surprise?
Boo!
What the heck.
hehe, tanx again to all those that voted yes to the deal with Palm. I said it all along that it was going to be like this, but almost nobody took me seriously.
I wanted Sun or Sony to buy Be, not Palm and even worst AOL. That may seem bad news but i think it’s for the better because OpenBeOS will once and for all put an end to the uncertainty around the platform.
is why Palm needs BeOS components. Why not just juse free Linux/Unix core OS components? It seems that if you are going to purchase an OS, you would be doing so with the intent of releasing your own platform based on that OS; I just don’t see how that is a palm device.
Maybe Palm was more interested in the BeIA work under development than BeOS itself.
This move doesn’t suprise me coming from Palm though. I have several friends who work for http://www.extendsys.com/ESI/default.htm“>Extended . Palm entered into negotiations with ES to purchase the company, then backed out at the last *possible* moment, causing a severe devaluation of the already low stock price of ES. A whole bunch of people got the axe as a result.
Palm, just like all the other fortune 500 companies is out there to make money. They just don’t really care whether or not they improve society in the process. That’s just the way big business is, I guess.
Start with a clean sheet of paper. Your goal is to make money with your existing assets. What would you choose
A) PDA and cell phone OS only
B) Release a desktop OS as well
Lets look at A. You can sell each copy for $5 to $10. there were little more than 10 million PDAs sold last year so that means a $50 to $100 million market for OS if you get 100% penetration. Not too impressive nor is PDA growth.
The cell phone market. some fine day 800 or so million of these might be shipped per year but guess what many of these will be basic voice phones (no OS other than firmware). A large group will run symbian and many will run on some internal OS. in this fiercely competitive market phone markers won’t pay $20 and probably not even $10 per copy. Palm would be lucky with 10% penetration meaning a market of $400 million (80 X $5), not bad but still not so interesting for a spin off of the OS group. That math will put investors to sleep. i am bored already.
Palm needs to release the desktop os or they don’t have a viable business model that is why they have responded after a day when news of yellow tab and a leaked version 6 came out. After all, they ignored beunited for an eternity before that.
is why Palm needs BeOS components.
Well, they spent $11 million on it, they better do something with it.
Why not just juse free Linux/Unix core OS components?
The Be engineers are the driving force behind the new PalmOS. And many of these Be engineers do not really like the Linux components. I mean, they were working hard on their own components for 10 years now. Why use Linux at this point? Needless to say that even Be only used BSD code when possible and not GNU. I suspect Palm does not want to open source anything, not even in 20 years from now, when that software will be obsolete.
It seems that if you are going to purchase an OS, you would be doing so with the intent of releasing your own platform based on that OS; I just don’t see how that is a palm device.
Palm was always based its dev tools on Windows. All PalmOS developers around the world are using Windows, why switch to an unknown OS? I do not see why Palm would switch their dev platform. There is no real reason for it.
Maybe Palm was more interested in the BeIA work under development than BeOS itself.
Yes. I think Palm is more interested in some parts of the BeIA, not BeOS.
I’ll never buy anything from Palm. I’m considering getting a HIPTOP from http://www.danger.com whenever it’s out, but Palm? TO HELL WITH THEM, this is very serious and nasty.
So forget about handhelds, may they simply disappear in a computing black hole. We have to focus on OpenBeOS&BlueOS.
Oh give me friggin break. Here we were all trying to write to Palm to let them know there was a market and then bam! You guys are all “hey creeps! quit buggin Palm” come down off of the high horse. If Palm looks at the be community as “buggin” them rather than as markets and developers – well then they’ve got a nice little journey to bankrupt land. Need I only point to Palm’s recent business, market share and stock trends — these guys can’t do business. BeOS would have been better off anywhere else but there. I’m not rabid about this – but I am practical – oh and yeah, I GOT it a long time ago when the focus shift came around. But I’ve got no regrets hoping Palm would release it, I’ve got no regrets about not buying a palm product, I’ve got no regrets in the time I spent using an OS I enjoyed. When Palm sells to another company – I’m gonna “bug” them about releasing the OS too. what the hell does it hurt?
1. PalmSource is not developing an x86 Desktop OS at this time.
2. PalmSource does not wish to license the x86 OS to anyone at this time.
3. PalmSource is developing an ARM based BeOS derived OS for handhelds.
4. PalmSource’s ONLY focus is the handheld OS at this time.
What hope is left?
The handheld OS will need a development platform. Although that development platform will not Be licensed to OEMs or other software houses at this time, it will be available to PalmSource ARM developers. I believe BeOS is the best candidate for that Development Platform because the BeIA tools were BeOS based.
If I were BeUnited, I would at least continue to develop applications for BeOS until the PalmSource conference February 5th. Frankly, I am not surprised that Palm has not been working on a desktop OS to be licensed to OEMs, even if they were, it would not be ready for licensing yet.
I will wait to hear and see about BeOS and it’s derivatives at the PalmSource developer conference http://www.palmsource.com/devconf.html
Long Live BeOS!
ciao
yc
i am sorry but nagel’s assertions are just ridiculous. The Palm OS was shipped in less than 5 million cell phones last year. What are they focusing on?
NOkia, Siemens, Ericsson, Motorola, Matsushita, and others control about 60% of the market share in phones and they all either support and/or are owners of symbian. cell phone makers won’t give up control of their cost structure to any OS vendor, not microsoft and not Palm, neither will phone operators. If nagel thinks otherwise then he will lead palm straight to the same burial site as copland. This is just plain nonsense.
More over, PDAs and PDA/cells are far more valuable when they sync to a PC. How long does nagel have before he wakes up and finds out that Palm OS won’t sync particularly well with windows. gates is no fool.
Bad news, isn;t it
Uh, Eugenia… would you care to sepculate why the BeOS communtiy is a pain in the ass?
YC, the development platform for PalmOS was, is and it will be, WINDOWS. PalmSource will only use some components of BeIA for their PalmOS, not the whole source tree. There is no reason for them to switch development platforms, especially when they have so many thousands of developers depended on their existing source code under Visual C++ or whatever they use. Do you think that these developers will abandon their WindowsXP for an unknown OS that they never heard of and that is likely to not even work correctly on their laptops and computers? If Palm was to do that, they will lose a lot of their devs. Please stop the dreaming and come to the real world. Money and source compatibility talks here, not romantism.
Well, not really a surprise but a blow to the face nonetheless. So there it is folks, BeOS is officially dead. We as a community are stuck with what R5 had (in compiled form) and nothing more – what came on your BeOS5 Pro CD is all that is left.
However, as Scot Hacker so truthfully said – “we are forever spoiled by BeOS.” If you have ever used Be, it has left its mark and that mark will never go away. We appreciated the simplicity, the design, the elegance, the power …. and all of that will stay with us forever. We’re at a point where we either dedicate ourselves to recreating what we remember or heading off to another platform. It’s a tough choice, but then again I can’t much remember a time when I didn’t struggle as a BeOS user.
I for one am staying and am planning to dedicate my time to the recreating (and improving) the only x86 operating system that deserves my time. Whether it’s OBOS or BlueOS, I’m still not sure … but I do know that BeOS was not a derivative of Linux and I’m not about to let it survive by riding the wave of another kernel (though I guess I’m more doubtful of BlueOS because they never update thier website and aren’t interested in letting the rest of the world know their progress – prove me wrong, BlueOS team). So OBOS, you have my skills and financial backing if you’d like.
Anyone want to join me?
>Uh, Eugenia… would you care to sepculate why the BeOS communtiy is a pain in the ass?
Because Palm was only interested in SOME of the Be technology and SOME of the Be engineers. They did not know about the BeOS community, neither they had any interest in BeOS. And suddenly boom! Their phones and mailboxes got filled up from BeOS users bugging them to release, open source or license the property they just bought and they did not even knew what to do with it yet. Palm was in shock of the situation back in August (yes, I know this for sure). They grew to try to avoid the BeOS community in any way. BeOS and its community is not what they wanted to buy for $11m. I feel that the community is unwanted by Palm. At least that is the information I have from a source and my personal experience with both Yankowski & Nagel’s secretary.
Well we know what the mission and goal is! The OpenBeOS folks are going to take us there. And BeOS will never die. I am kinda glad that we got an answer, though it wasn’t what BeUnited nor the BeOS community wanted 🙁
It looks like it’s going to be a busy year for the BeOS (now OBOS) community to get back on track!
Go Team Go!!!
BeUnited could support something similar to the driver fund (http://driverfund.beunited.org/) but for OpenBeos, I’m willing to send some cash by Paypal to the OBOS team, maybe more join as developing progresses.
I told you so just yesterady – your emotions and expectations were too high. Palm is kind of company don’t giving a s*it of BeOS itself. Accepting that as a fact will help you to swallow the bitter reality. If you will get scattered (and BeOS community doesn’t seem to behave as a community in my eyes, it can’t compare to Amiga’s one), you will NOT make impression on Palm Inc. Amigans did – once Gateway bought Amiga, they found out there is strong community of followers (because of thousands of emails sent to them), and at least tried to do something about it …
I think that if you will not talk to Palm as unified community, you have no chance to succeed….
So, another OSxyz initiative born. I just wonder when all Be groups can get some BeOS-like system working and well supported.
-pekr-
About Nagel and…about OpenBeos also. Or BeOSNG is not going to need shades to see its future.
Time to go to plan B…
someone get rolling that leaked BeOS 6 source…
Hehe!!
But, just to look at it…
So, Palm doesn’t want BeOS, but won’t let anyone else have it. I would love to hear them explain that one, but they would never make the effort.
what a surprise! I’ll never buy a palm personal again. How u noticed how are the so happy? Like a child with a lollipop!
enthusiastic beos users for it
Thanks for nothing David Nagel. Could you be any more rude…His tone in the email is what bothers me the most.
Palm is heading for the shitter, and is taking BeOS with it. Now, give me a show of hands…Who still thinks it was a good idea to vote yes on the Palm deal?
May PalmOS remain the outdated piece of crap that it is…
-G
Not to Belittle BeUnited’s technical skills, but it would Be a bad idea to licence an unfinished product to BeUnited or anyone else. That could lead to an ever ending nightmare. The OS will need to Be finished (drivers support, apps, etc…) and polished before licensing. That is a rather huge undertaking and PalmSource simply can’t afford to do that at this time.
I think Nagel made it very clear with this sentense:
“We are a small (and new) company that simply must focus all its energy on the principal task of providing great operating systems and other platform components to the handheld computing and communication device market.”
As a development platform however, they can distribute it as part of a tool set with limited drivers and application support. In this case they would only need to support it as a development tool for developers.
Wait until PalmSource for more details.
http://www.palmsource.com/devconf.html
ciao
yc
🙁 well sad news, but as said above it is news, although its not what most of us want to hear I thank Palm for responding. I resepect that they are a company. I hope the do decide in time to do something with BeOS. I supported the sale to Palm, not just because I wanted something back on my investment but because there was a group of fine engineers who put 10 years into BeOS and I wasn’t going to see them out a job because their old management made mistakes. I hope the are enjoying their new job. I still think in time Palm will do something with BeOS, but for now they have more important things like not going out of business. I agree with what was said above that they probly made this announcement largely to get people off their backs. I wait to see the new palm devise with the new Be-ified OS. Maybe if I can or it looks good I will buy it, maybe cause it’s good, maybe cause its a part of BeOS living on. I think saying I will never buy anything Palm is counter what would help things. For there to be a chance of Palm releasing BeOS they need to stay alive, and most likely be doing well before going about such a plan. If Palm dies then you will be taking your chances with yet another company and trying to get it out of them. Palm buying Be was/is still the best chance for BeOS surviving. If they or anyone else had not, Be would have died with the code. It would have been sealed for ever or even deleted thus gone forever. It would have never been open sourced. BeOS isn’t dead its just not active. It’d dormant till further notice. We know where is is and its’ status. BeOS could still be brought back even a few years from now and still be usable with some drivers. It was ahead of its’ time. I think one of the best things we can do now is support Palm and wish them well and keap them aware that people would like to see BeOS live and use it. If we act like we hate them, or do something to piss them off they arn’t going to bend over to our wishes. More like likely a big F^*( you and wave good bye.
Fair well BeOS, I’ll miss you It was fun while it lasted, Hope your at least chilling on a nice 7 way hobbit and having a good retirement.
Yup, I will not buy anything Palm myself either. In fact, I had decided that since August, the day my husband was laid off from Be. Jbq is a very nice person though, he does not think like me ;-), so he innocently asked me a month ago, if I would like a Palm Pilot as a Christmas present. I told him that if he would buy something of the such, I would throw it out of the window (neither I need a PDA anyway). So, he bought for me the Dance-Dance Revolution Konami pad & game instead.
Come on, who has R6? Share with the community!
Eugenia- lol!
I pretty much agree. I’d get an iPaq and load linux or QNX on it…
ah, that makes sense…
Eugenia, based on Nagel’s recent interview, where he talked about pervasive muti-threading etc… I think they will Be using the a Be micro-kernel. It would Be unwise to throw away Be’s tested higher level APIs and attempt to graph the old “weak”, “single threaded” stuff from the current PalmOS.
That said, I expect the ARM based OS to Be very similar to BeIA. Remember Nagel gave praises to the BeIA tools. Now, along the same lines, it would Be easier for Palm to use the BeOS based BeIA tools where the are instead of trying to port them to winblows.
Remenber MetroWerks, they write development tools for the current PalmOS.
http://www.metrowerks.com/products/palm/
They also wrote the BeIDE and the framework for the cross platform development done under BeOS. It just makes more sense to me, that considering how Palm is pressed to deliver, that they would take the more direct route!
Now, the ARM based environment should Be a whole new ball game. If they try to maintain API compatibility with the OLD Palm OS I think that would be a BIG mistake. They are dealing with tight memory constraints and can not afford extra garbage. They should go clean with a BeIA like environment with all new development tools from Metrowerks.
I will wait until the PalmSource conference to see what they have been up to. If I don’t like what I see, I will sell my Palm shares and bail out
http://www.palmsource.com/devconf.html
Long Live BeOS in Handhelds and/or Desktops!
ciao
yc
I look at it this way, Palm is ensuring that there’s fewer choices for the computer users of the world. The way it stands, you can suffer with Windows, suffer with Linux, or, if you’re a x386 user, shell out a lot of money and then suffer with Apple. And let’s face facts, Windows is dominant in the PC market.
So why should the PDA market be any different? For what reason would I buy a Palm if it didn’t have Windows (of whatever flavor) on it? For the same reason, why should I buy anything that Palm decides to develop whether it’s a cell phone or something else?
Palm has made my decision for me. Morever, they have shown everyone what to do. Don’t bother with Palm, get something with a Microsoft badge on it.
While we’re at it, we may as well forget about the DOJ vs Microsoft. It’s quite evident that we’re all being pushed to Microsoft by the very people we’d like to support. Let them have carte blanche. After all, they deserve it. They’ve already won over their peers no matter how they’d like you to think differently on the surface.
Perhaps I’ll mail them telling them thank you, thank you for proving that your company isn’t quite worth the effort to support. I will purchase a WinCE (or whatever it is these days) device to handle all my needs.
And, frankly, any company that thinks that supportive customers are a pain in the ass deserve to go under.
I will support any other project involving BeOS though. OBOS, YellowTAB, whatever. I WILL use what I want to use.
Why are folks screaming for the leaked “R6”? It’s not that spectacular, and even if we got it, we’d still have worry about the future and work on OBOS nonetheless.
Heh, OBOS is trying to write an entire commercial-grade OS themselves… they’re not even using anything (except NewOS) as a base to work off of!! Personally, it doesn’t seem practical to me. Maybe, just MAYBE, if they were using a Linux kernel and working off the framebuffer for the graphics it could work…. but writing an OS like BeOS from scratch is gonna be tough.
Guess I won’t be supporting any Palm products anytime soon.
From this message i saw only that Palm will not license to BeUnited.
No more.
It does not mean, that they never license it with someone with big background (read – pocket).
Because only trustworthy licensee in this world is Big Pocket.
And i understand their logic – “what the heck is this BeUnited?” – from this utilitary point of view.
‘Cause they couldn’t have treated BeOs users worse, and when you are treated like that by someone, trying to be kind to fix things makes a bigger jerk. Some people don’t want to read it clearly, they don’t want the desktop BeOs they bought, period, they want everything else.
So Nagel and Palm’s dozen, bite me!
“It is a final decision.”
Now lets move on to OpenBeos completly.
What are you people crazy?
Have you ever used an M505?
Palm handhelds are awsome and I expect much more from a BeOS derived OS and the ARM processor.
How do we know that Palm will not come out with a desktop killer?
I say wait for PalmSource developer conference before giving up.
BeUnited should keep cranking out code for BeOS and in the near future ARM based PalmOS as well.
ciao
yc
Heeey people,cannot you see what´s going on there??
FORGET THE PC!!!
PLEASE support the REBIRTH of the new ATARI!!!:-)
At:www.xtos.de
This page doesn´t looks so proffessional,because it was made with an old Atari.
But it is a serious project:-)
On the PC,the one company is more stuipid than the other one.
Cannot YOU FINALLY show them the POWER OF USERS???
They all don´t care about users and programmers.I bet many people have support the BeOS.Many programmers worked for BeOS Software.
Palm simple cannot respect this work,they don´t care about anything like Microsoft.Only aboout their little PALM hand toys…and any Palm OS.
They don´t need to care about BeOS,but BeOS could be free when they don´t need this OS anymore.Maybe some parts,but it is something diffrent.Or do you reaally believe that the Palm stuff witl be serious someday??
My deepest wish woul be when many people shows Palm and Microsoft and all the PC companies that we don´t need them!!!
WE simple don´t need them…they can put their Palm and PC toy into their A..!!!
Ones again…PLASE supprot in any way the REBIRTH of the new Atari:-)and forget the PC:-)
at:www.xtos.de
THANKS4read
I love reading how you fools won’t buy Palm products because of what they’ve done to you. Boo-hoo! Did you ever consider blaiming Be, Inc. or Gassee for running a great product into the ground, for never having a viable business plan in the first place but switching business plans every 6 months, or for not selling to an actual desktop OS company when they were offered a reasonable price for the assets? No, it’s all Palm’s fault because they went to the fleamarket and found Be lying in a pile of trash for a quarter.
Give it up! Learn from the lessons of Amiga and Digital (2 companies with stronger, larger, truer communities than Be) and wake up to the little world you live in. You are harking back to a heyday when even then the Be community wasn’t as large as the NeXT community.
I don’t get where the confusion and hope is for you guys. Why would Palm RE-release BeOS when it already failed? That’s not going to help Palm make any more money? And even if they only take one line of code and two employees from Be, $11 million dollars was nothing for Palm even with their stock price hurting. Why don’t you actually support Palm so that maybe a dev tool or two, a new file system, some mutlitasking capabilities, etc. end up in the PalmOS and then some of your features would live on? Instead you want to punish them when the fact of the matter is: if Palm didn’t buy Be, someone else much worse would have (Microsoft) or they simply would have gone out of business.
>I love reading how you fools won’t buy Palm products because of what they’ve done to you. Boo-hoo! Did you ever consider blaiming Be, Inc. or Gassee for running a great product into the ground,…
The ‘original’ blame is Be’s. I agree on that.
BTW, are you an (ex)-Be engineer?
Too bad so sad. I wonder what will happen next?!?! I don’t buy into this Desktop is dead bollocks.
Well it dosnt suprise me palm isnt interested in be development after all it was the same when gateway bought the rights to amiga the kept what they wanted and sold the rest.Anyway i would not buy a palm pda i have a psion series5 mx much better.anyway the sharp zaurus pda looks better than palm runs linux.Lets keep using beos as long as the software is there to download and it works on my system im going to carry on using it after all its near to amiga operating system for a pc being reliable easy to use very fast and more stable than other operating systems.
Mr. dp:
The reason people won’t buy Palm is not because they won’t rerelease the BeOS, but because they’re going to trash the entire project in favor of a few lines of code, presumably. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask Palm to simply open source the non-licensed code that they don’t intend to use or somehow feed the BeOS community. Here’s my prediction: had they done that, 90% of BeOS R6 users would be asking for a new “Palm Pilot” for Christmas 2002. Instead, they leave the BeOS community feeling snubbed and confused, which can’t be good for business.
The community is large. I have a Palm Vx, and I’m not particularly thrilled with it. I prefer my RIM Blackberry. You can bet I won’t care much when it comes time for new hardware and there’s a new Palm out. I don’t care how badly Be, Inc. screwed up, the code is in Palm’s hands now. That’s just me: if it’s unfair to be upset with Palm, them’s the breaks: I am.
I just wanted to say that Dance Dance Revolution rules =) When does the BeOS version complete with geekport adapter for the dance pads come out?
>>The ‘original’ blame is Be’s. I agree on that.
I disagree!
BeOS could not succeed in the market and still can not succeed because of Microsoft’s illegal contracts with OEMs.
When these contracts are voided, BeOS could earn PalmSource much more revenue than the handheld OS. It will then make more sense to release a desktop OS.
I guess it’s easier to throw blames around than it is to get to the heart of the problem and really look at the facts!
The fact of the matter is, at this time, PalmSource is doing the right thing because if they released a desktop OS they still could not license it to major OEMs.
That’s just an undisputable fact!
ciao
yc
I don’t blame Palm at all. They had an agenda when they bought Be, and it certainly wasn’t to give the source to a few hundred lowly developers and users. Be’s demise can be blamed solely on Be’s poor upper management and lack of communication. I no longer even hope to see the source of BeOS R6, hope has made me into a very impatient and disappointed individual … OBOS is an interesting project and I hope it does well.
What about AtheOS? It already has a decent kernel, a web browser (KHTML!), a basic GUI, networking support. I may just turn there. Kurt is one talented guy.
The unfortunate truth… I’ve just been way to scared to say that on a site like OSNews. Sucks, too… BeOS had promise back in 1995.
If BeOS went bankrupt without finding a buyer we would have had a chance of ‘buying’ the license as this would have been the only value left in the company + no NDA’s. If a company like Palm buys Be it’s obvious not only for the engineers. Now it’s hard, Yellow Tab stand no chance coz they don’t have the sourcecode or even if they do can’t use it. OBOS has a long way to go and personaly I think BlueOS has the best chance of succeeding but frankly I can’t believe it would feel like the old BeOS. Well anyway it won’t be long before Palm gets bought or goes down, that day I will buy you guys a beer 😉
On supporting Palm… Just think, if they go splat, the IP is up for sale (again
Anyone have 11m in loose change?
On OBOS is pointless as it’ll take too long, go use <insert kernel here> and <insert windowing system here>, use BluOS.
On combining BlueOS/OBOS, they are not really all that combatable. OBOS intends on re-implementing everything from scrach, while BlueOS belives that the linux kernel and X-Windows System will do as the basics.
ASAIK Ge is to make sure that BeOS OpenR2 (i.e. BlueOS & OBOS) are source-code combatable, and both sport the same post R1 API’s. But I could be wrong here, it might just be to test out cool idea’s for OBOS, I’ve not been following BlueOS.
Ahh well, this was to be expected.
I hope OBOS/BlueOS get off the ground.
mlk
I don’t know if I can completly agree about BlueOs having more chances, although they have focus very wisely the problem getting the Linux kernel and Xfree (for a start), I have to say that their website and workarounds look somehow “misterious” to me, like “hellooo!!!, is anybody there!!!”. A more open mind, and a bit of polisihing the site won’t hurt them.
Best wishes for BlueOs, as I said that project is very promising and wisely orientated, but show up guys! share it a bit.
http://discussion.brighthand.com/palmhandhelds/
sorry, did not mean to say OBOS is pointless, just replying to ppl that have, stating the Linux kernel as the way to go.
Adam, you’re a supporter of a company that went down the crapper so maybe you don’t understand this: if you buy a company, its assets, its patents, you do not give away those assets in part or whole if you intend to do anything with it. How should Palm go about Open Sourcing the code? If they do it in full, they can’t license the technologies they incorporate because they’re now public. If they do it in part, then the OS community just has bits and pieces of an OS and are more screwed becuase the “good stuff” is proprietary and locked up. Even if they could release bits of code, why would they do this? Wouldn’t you allow your staff the luxury of getting to know all the code and learning from it, maybe re-introducing a bit a year or two down the line? No, all of this code will and should remain the exclusive property of Palm, only to be re-licensed through what is integrated with the PalmOS.
yc, what about targeting and courting the Mac community then bailing on it (and the PowerPC) because of “hurt feelings” against Apple? What about its fantastic ability to court developers to produce applications for the system? No, Be was always a horribly run company with a silly man who thought he knew more about aesthetics, style, image, and design than Steve Jobs at the top; and those personal feelings and egotism hurt Be much more and earlier on than most Be fans can face.
Eugenia, no, I’m not a Be-developer; in fact, I was hoping you could guestimate number of BeOS (1) users, (2) developers, (3) applications out of curiosity. I try to keep in touch about quite a bit, but I’m wondering what the size and ability of this “community” actually is.
while i have no doubt that they are not licensing their code, i wouldn’t believe another word palm says.
lie 1
We purchased be for its engineers
lie 2
we purchased be for the billing software
lie 3
Palm os 5 will not be based on beia (we’ll base it on crappy palm os 4)
lie 4
after 4 months we never saw the beunited proposal
Palm is so full of it that it hurts my ears to hear them speak. I have no idea what they will do but it is clear to me that they have not been forthcomming yet. Don’t believe them. nagel has done everything he can to distance palm from beos and beia. We just want the engineers. if so then why has the apparent leak of beos 6 caused such a quick response. Why does nagel need to distance himself? Be and palm, liars in love.
>>sorry, did not mean to say OBOS is pointless, just replying to ppl that have, stating the Linux kernel as the way to go.<<
Though I don’t think ‘BlueOS’ is pointless, I do think that at the end of the day, it is just another distribution of Linux (no pun intended towards them or you).
I do wish them luck and hope that they can work closely with the OpenBeOS group in the future since they and the BeOS community has one goal, and that is to keep BeOS going no matter where it is coming from.
I am shocked that those corporate retards at Palm chose this approach I frankly will not ever buy a Palm product again..go MS;) Stupid company so greedy those fucks bought Be for freaking 11 million aka 2 bucks. That HELLA pisses me off. Go OBOS!
I helped out with BlueOS a little… Guillaume needs to open-source more and not be so closed about who can do what. The more developers the better. And don’t play God about it. It’s like the difference between AtheOS and Linux. Their ages are comparable. But the AtheOS guy doesn’t let anyone in, and Linus lets everyone in.
OBOS picked an unpractical plan, and BlueOS is run by code-commies. Oh, well.
>>what about targeting and courting the Mac community then bailing on it (and the PowerPC) because of “hurt feelings” against Apple?
Apple chose not to release details that Be needed about their architecture. That why BeOS PPC for Macs ran into problems, Be did not bail out.
The market for a desktop OS platform is the x86. PPC would have been nice but Intel x86 is the place to Be. Too bad Microsoft choke that market.
I hope someone publishes a book about the rise and fall of Be Inc. with lots of juicy details…
ciao
yc
good lord… you guys are starting to sound like the fanatics from both Amiga and Mac camps… How many of you actually understand what Palm is trying to do with PalmOS 5 and the next generation of ARM units? Boo-hoo.. Be is dead.. Palm should go out of business for not releasing BeOS or licensing it. Get over it.
Even if BeOS was licensed or source code released, it doesn’t mean it’ll go futher than it has at this point. Look at Amiga and all it’s resurrections. I swear the lot of you needs to get over it.
I just installed my copy of BeOS 4.5 again on an old machine (K6-233, 64MB) and in no time did I have a websurfing, multimedia playing box. I can understand how Be failed in the market, given MS treatment of OEM’s. But it’s still sad to see such an elegant OS go down the drain.
Palm will do nothing with it, they have enough problems on their hands and it will wither in the vault and die. Just like so many other products which showed promise and were abandoned by their creators, corporations et. al.
I wonder if any shareholders can sue for a public release of BeOS code after Palm folds. Would be nice.
Palm’s creditors would sue if Palm folds and releases BeOS to the public.
>>I hope someone publishes a book about the rise and fall of Be Inc. with lots of juicy details…<<
That will be in Robert X Cringley’s next novel;
“Accidental Empires… and the victims it left behind” the sequel 🙂
I’m getting very tired of people looking down at BeOS users for sticking to BeOS. Saying that they are just as craaazy as the fanatic Amiga users(I don’t think they are crazy btw).
You know what? I’ve never wanted BeOS to become the next mainstream OS, the Windows replacement. I don’t want that now either. All I want is an OS that is fun to use and a tight community that make you feel welcome. And I have that allready, BeOS R5 is a wonderful OS. Sure it has flaws, but so does every other OS out there.
However, I’m sad to say that the community isn’t really what it used to be. But there are still many cool people hanging around, and there are still newbies dropping in all the time. I feel that at least the people at BeShare are keeping the old community spirit.
And that’s pretty much what it’s all about, the spirit, the ideals. It doesn’t matter how nice the feature lists of other operatingsystems are, if it doesn’t have that spirit, it won’t be a pleasent OS for me to work/play in. You can go on and on about how MacOS X has lower latency than BeOS, or that Linux has hardware OpenGL support and a journaling filesystem, I don’t really care. It’s all about ideals to me, and that’s what brought me to BeOS in the first place. It was the natural thing to move on to after leaving the Amiga(as a main platform) cause it has that same spirit. It’s like “we can be serious about things but still have fun”, and everyone is equal and important.
BeOS and it’s community has really changed my life a lot, way more than the Amiga did. I’ll never regret using BeOS, it has certainly not been a waste of time.
It’s sad to see people, who obviously wants to use and develop for BeOS, just sitting around rolling their thumbs waiting for a new release to come knocking on their door. It’s like a new version has become more important than actually being able to use the operating system.
I hope that those people gets inspired by efforts such as Honeycomb. You know, there is a lot that can be done with BeOS R5, especially audio stuff. There is no need to sit around and wait, the community is still there the OS is still there. If a new version of the OS comes out, cool, that’s great. If it doesnt, we will still have a cool OS with a lot of useful apps.
So please don’t tell me to stop dreaming and face the reality. Cause I know that the reality is that BeOS is still alive, the community is still there. And it’s not impossible to make something good out of our current situation.
Let’s have fun.
Sorry, yc, Microsoft was only a contributing factor. Ultimately Be’s “failure” came from the insistence of their management that bundling with an OEM was the only measure of success. It wasn’t. It seems to be fashionable now to forget just how bright BeOS’s future seemed at the end of 1999 as a real-time media processing niche market player, or to claim that a niche market wouldn’t be enough–but a niche market is exactly what kept Apple alive.
Yes, by the measure that Be insisted on using, they couldn’t succeed on the desktop. But it was an absurd measure. The only limiting factors they had in the vertical markets that were desperately trying to embrace them were, in fact, engineering failures: talk to anyone who worked at ObjektSynth or Adamation about the years spent waiting for the Media Kit to actually do everything it was supposed to and do all of it correctly. (Some would say they were still waiting after R5.)
It’s possible to argue that by 2000, Be needed to have one huge win–they couldn’t wait for a slow build in a vertical market. Perhaps, but knifing the vertical market in its back was absolutely suicidal. BeOS was getting interest from IA makers as BeOS; assigning engineering resources to specific features tailored to the IA market wouldn’t have required dumping the existing commercial product. (I’m saying that as a developer at a small company that has a commercial product with branch versions tailed to specific clients.)
Well, it’s been fun. I’ll certainly keep watching OpenBeOS and BlueOS, but what appealed to me most about BeOS was its potential for resurrecting the cottage software industry of the early ’80s–little, one- and two-person commercial software houses. That’s not going to happen to a real degree on any free operating system, whether or not it’s BeOS-compatible. I’m having fun learning Mac OS X now, though.
Even so, I’ll keep missing Gobe Productive every time I launch Word X (the slowest word processor I’ve ever used, including CP/M WordStar).
Hey is that you? I haven’t seen you since the BeNews days (or maybe I’m not paying any attention sorry. Well at least your still around and still sticking up for and speaking up for BeOS. I think that the BeOS community will be just fine, though this will be a rebuilding year for the developers and the community. If you haven’t already joined, there is an open forum that is being hosted by BeUnited (it was OpenBeOS) called ‘Glass Elevator’ and they are asking for input from the BeOS community on issues ranging from the kernel to the UI itself. So join up and give your 2 cents…
http://beunited.org/mailman/listinfo/glasselevator_beunited.org
Enjoy 🙂
While I agree that it’s a blow to BeUnited and it looks like the coffin is almost closed, I disagree that the heart of BeOS has stopped beating.
The final decision was not to LICENSE anything from BeOS to anyone else, other than what goes into PalmOS. I didn’t hear anything about a final decision not to develop BeOS or a new desktop derivative based on BeOS on their own (they did make it clear that it would not be happening NOW though!)
If there is an R6 or a desktop OS based on BeOS technology, it ***WILL NOT*** happen anytime before the DOJ comes to terms with M$ about it’s behavioral remedies, most notably the bootloader issue.
If the bootloader license is not changed, it’s over, for BeOS and anyone else thinking about a commercial x86 desktop OS. No one in their right mind will walk into this market again, not when they’re walking into the wall that is Micro$oft (even if they had the golden master for a finished R6 ready to ship.)
That said, if the BeOS community can continue to support BeOS ala the support the Atari 1040ST has gotten, then BeOS will be running on many desktops for years to come. I know mine will!
>>While I agree that it’s a blow to BeUnited and it looks like the coffin is almost closed, I disagree that the heart of BeOS has stopped beating.
Finally, someone actually read Nagel’s email!
We shouldn’t equate a “decline to license at this time” to “will never develop”. If you think about it, what they’re doing is simply avoiding the exact same deadly mistake that Be made by not rechearching the target market thoroughly enough whtn they stopped making the BeBox.
To release a desktop OS without OEM support when you’re not a desktop OEM is just crazy. Be learned that the hard way. When Microsoft remedies go into effect, PalmSource will hopefully work on a general public release of a DeskTop OS.
For now, I’d Be more than happy with a limited Palm development platform for developers only. That would give developers to write some Apps while the Microsoft issues are worked out.
ciao
yc
I mean here is a group that is gonna Pay $$ liscensing or pay Palm Inc. a certain % of profit to develop a pre-built OS. I mean they paid a couple million for it. So now they are gonna shut down what they bought shrinking their potential earnings on this Purchase. They are turning an asset into a loss. The media server built into BeOS isn’t gonna make millions of dollars instantly when Palm integrates it into their new PalmOS. They must have a lot of numb nuts working there. To me it’s like buying a gold mine, stripping it of the tools and supplies and not allowing someone to make you money by mining it. Meaning you take no responsibility and don’t get involved in mining and still make a buck.
Stupid Stupid Stupid.
YellowTab. good luck!
Dream on.
The whole point of Palm is splitting into two companies is that they want to ensure HandSpring and Sony that the OS side of the business will concentrate on developing Palm OS 5.0 and that the OS side of the business will not give the hardware side of the business an unfair discount vis-a-vis the price they are charging HandSpring and Sony.
The moment Palm decides to go head to head with Microsoft on the desktop OS market, HandSpring, Sony and all the other Palm OS licenses are going to drop their Palm-OS based PDA’s. That’s like Be Inc. abandoning the desktop OS market to concentrate on the IA market — and all those pro-audio companies started dropping their BeOS projects.
The potential cut of the future profit wouldn’t even cover Palm’s legal fees to draw up the contract. Be Inc. probably only had a total of 5-6 million dollars of revenue during the whole 10 years of existence. Even if Be Inc. had a Microsoft’s monopolistic gross profit margin of 90%, Be Inc. can’t even pony up the 11 million dollars to buy back the IP. NGE sold less than 300 copies of Corum III. Dane Scott sold 100 copies of TuneTracker.
…to kill myself.
When he was so sure Apple would buy Be and would never buy NeXT because Jobs was NeXT’s CEO. I’m Glad Apple Bought Be, because At least Jobs has a vision and know how hard sometimes it can be to achieve I’ts vision.
If Apple had bought Be, Apple would be in serious trouble these days …..
Gassée wil jump on the hypest bangWagon (PPC when everyone thinks PPC, x86 when PPC failed, Internet when x86 failed).
I was a Be supporter for a long time, doing demos and evangelising before many of you knew or heard of BeOS. I felt betrayed by be , Gassée never had the courage to say that PPC was Dead, He should.
The never shoudl have let 6n month between r4.0 and r4.5 too many people where waiting for what was first announced has 4.1. Many people stop buying software from compagnies like beatware at this time because everyone was waiting for 4.5. Be should have released a 4.1 iun January and 4.5 in September (with G3 unofficial support in it). Then They focused on R5, Giving R5 was a great Idea but the Given r5 should have been more restricted so many more users would have bought the OS in the early release date, which would have build a number of users (a commercial community) that be could have use to convince dev. to release apps for the OS.
Thanks
Now, PE is still out there. No one can take that one away from us ever, so would the remaining develops help us teflon heads into creating some useful code that can help whats left of this OS?
What do you man know of amiga and its history? You should know, that it was exactly PC company, who killed it – first Commodore mangement, second Escom going down (they had good plans though), and then Gateway completly screwing things up. Jim Collas (GW) was the best manager I saw with Amiga Inc. so far. But you know the play of big boys. First they switched to Linux – move which was plain nonsense, second – he silently left the company overnight. That’s the image of big companies – they don’t care!
Many of Amiga folks left to Be, Linux or Windows. Today “community” can’t even be compared to those of few years back – really stupid infightings, e.g. against amiga-like OS – http://www.MorphOS.de .
I just hope you know the value of some kind of community, to call the ppl fanatics.
As for Amiga – they seem to be dead – simply – they are not so vocal anymore, but that doesn’t seem they are dead at all. The company is owned by former Amigans – so – we have strong advantage here agains BeOS fans. AInc. owns OS, they are developing AmigaDE. The shame is non post BeOS company owns a license to further coordinate development of OS.
-pekr-
Bastards! I hope Palm will die.
you know this could actually be good news. It could well mean that palm plans to release a desktop variant of the beos themselves after the MS antitrust matters are sorted.
Palms decision and the way they reacted are proof that beos/beia are in fact their most important assets. They’d never admit that though because to do so would piss off Be’s former share holders and admit to palms shareholders that palm was in deep trouble. It would also attract attention from MS.
I believe we’ll see a desktop from palm if Be, inc sues microsoft under antitrust and once the MS antitrust deal is finalized with the fed. the former is important. you have to give be’s shareholders cash or hope of it because if they find out that palm is actually a new be then they might seek legal action against palm, be, etc and that would not be good for anyone.
What could Palm do about the fact everybody started spreading the BeOS / BeIA source? Everybody loving BeOS wants this! (when BeShare will be left out of it, nothing can stop us) It’s time for anarchie!
Paul, let’s say you’re a software developer. Are you going to develop anything for a platform where the userbase stole source code and gave away trade secrets, even if the software was abandonware? Someone steals the source and I can guarantee that there won’t be a software company that touches BeOS with a ten-foot pole anymore.
Not a very good idea…
That icicle you thought was forming in hell just melted. BeOS is dead.
I don’t think this should have been too big of a suprise. Palm has had declining sales and market share for awhile now and It even suprised me that they spent so much to buy Be’s IP, but they did it because they really needed it to survive. They aren’t going to turn around and give it away unless you really offered them some serious capital.
Lots of BeInc bashing on here too, wasted time, their not even a company anymore.
BlueOS has the only realistic chance in my mind. It’s discouraging that we’ve already fragmented, but only by two. Continuing on the realistic track, only Linux poses any threat in the x86 world today. Even with their massive fragmentation they are still achiving a unified goal, albeit a little slower than if they were united. They are progressing, and the OS is becoming easier to use and drivers are coming out. All BlueOS needs to do is get far enough to show that they are a better window manager for the Linux Kernel than Xfree and they will start getting developers like nobody’s business. The only people getting investment and root money anymore are linux projects that Big Blue and other countries are picking up. I wasn’t a Linux fan either when I had a taste of BeOS but if you give yourself a few months to get your hands dirty with it you’ll see they have a CHANCE. Get of your high horse and realize that vanilla BeOS failed and if we have any chance it’s going to be jumping on #2’s bandwagon, which thankfully is very inviting.
So I ask you again, what’s more realistic? A few guys use one of many “I want to write a new OS aka a bootloader” projet files and try to write the BeOS back totally from ground zero or we try and make a BeOS Windowing System on Linux that already has an established Filesystem, Networking, Kernel (that’s actively being developed), massive development community, professional development companies, and support from ACTUAL BIG COMPANIES? There are a million linux apps out there under GNU that you can simply copy&paste the code, change the visual appearence to look like a Be app and you’re in business, WITH THE AUTHORS blessing as long as he gets a shoutout and you don’t try and sell it. WAKE UP PEOPLE.
Wow! I hope this never happens to Linux! Oh, wait… it *can’t* happen to Linux, because of the GPL. It only happens to proprietary software. Huh. Guess maybe Tricky Dick Stallman was right!
There are a lot of points made here- both good and bad. I wanted to add one thing.
I think that it is a shame that no company in the world has the sheer intestinal fortitude to take Microsoft head-on in the desktop market. It has become quite clear that everyone wants to try and tip-toe around them by focusing on Internet Appliances, PDA’s, and cell phones. This saddens and frustrates me because those that had the vision (i.e., Palm) can no longer see past their noses to use their resources (that they are fortunate to have) to bring to the masses a revolutionary product, while those that still have the dream are being kept from even getting a fair shake at bringing it to fruition.
Even though it is silly to be attached to something that only exists as electronic bits, I will always hold a place in my heart and remember what a joy it was to use the BeOS, for I feel that there will never be a computer experience quite like it again.
Once again my comment is more wordy than I intended and no-one that can do anything about it will read it or be moved by it, but I had to get it off my chest.
Please, e-mail your replies. Be sure to remove the characters in capitals from the above e-mail address.
Big Al: The problem is you still think “company”. Think free, as in terms of opensource, gnu, whatever you like but companies have let the BeOS community down. Only things like OSS could have given certainty BeOS future wouldn’t have been taken away from us.
I say anargy, I say don’t trust companies anymore!
But without companies like Adobe, you don’t get PhotoShop. Without Microsoft, you don’t get office. So what if you have an OS developed by a non-entity – until you have other non-entities creating competitive software on the user side you’ll just be left with a slick OS and nothing to run on it. Sounds familiar.
Ryan, you think that Palm thought that BeOS/BeIA are important valuable assets — think again. From Palm’s SEC filings, the total transaction costs Palm 12.15 million dollars (11 million + 1.15 million in commissions/legal fees).
Quote from the SEC filings:
The Be asset purchase price was allocated as follows (in thousands):
Amortization
Period Amount
—— ——
Core Technology 36 mos. $ 800
Non-Compete Covenants 24 mos. 780
Goodwill 10,570
——-
Total Purchase Price $12,150
=======
So basically, BeOS/BeIA is worth 800K to Palm. Palm allocated 11.35 million dollars for the engineers.
ryan said: “More over, PDAs and PDA/cells are far more valuable when they sync to a PC. How long does nagel have before he wakes up and finds out that Palm OS won’t sync particularly well with windows. gates is no fool.”
You hit nail on the head! MS will use its Windows monopoly to make damn sure WINCE PDA work better than PALM PDAs on Windows, and then PALM will be screwed.
PALM: “We have weighed all our options. After consulting with many black ties that can’t find their ass with both hands and a flashlight, we’ve come to the conclusion that its best for us to put all of our eggs in one basket. That strategy has worked well in the past, after all.”
without beos/beia, i don’t see the palm OS unit as really having much of a business model. I’d also add that the OS unit needs to be freed from the hardware unit or microsoft will have a field day.
The whole reason why RIM’s BlackBerry is popular is because their server software seamlessly gather your emails from Microsoft’s Exchange server and send it to the RIM pager automatically. The RIM pager device doesn’t have to run on WinCE.
Same thing for Palm PDA’s — Palm is gunning for the enterprise PDA market. As long as Palm can develop server softwares (that runs on Windows XP) that seamlessly transfer files and emails via VPN to the PalmOS-based PDA’s — there is no disadvantage that PalmPilot is not running WinCE.
PalmOS Inc. decides to split with PalmHardware for the same reason why Lucent split with AT&T. Sprint doesn’t want to buy Lucent switches because that would subsidize AT&T’s long distance telephone unit (which competes with Sprint). So in order for Lucent to get more hardware businesses from Sprint, they had to split with AT&T. Same thing for Palm, Palm doesn’t want Sony or HandSpring to feel that if they license PalmOS — then they are subsidizing Palm’s hardware business.
I don’t see BeOS/BeIA as a “viable business model”. Competing with Microsoft on the desktop OS market is a full time job that sucks valuable cash, management time and engineering staff. Sony and HandSpring would drop their PalmOS-based PDA the moment Palm Inc. announces that they are going into the desktop OS market — just like those pro-audio developers dropping their BeOS based projects the moment Be Inc. decided to go into the IA OS market.
fuck palm and there shit pda,s
Add thousands of annoying abandoned BeOS users to the pool of (ageing) annoying abandoned Amiga users. Everytime a story pops up about WindowsXP, Linux, FreeBSD, QNX, MacOSX etc…someone will chime in with a long tirade on how amiga/BeOS did it better 10 years ago.
They will finish by describing the open source amiga/BeOS project that is “almost done” after 10 years of work…it is expected “soon” and will dominate the market 3 weeks after its release when God communicates its superiority to the world through a statue of a fish in Prague.
Let go guys….