Palm Strongly Declines BeOS Licensing to BeUnited

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.”


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