From TheRegister: “..sysadmin Robin Bandy, who launched the alternative DNS co-op OpenNIC, proposed first to Be Inc and subsequently to Palm, that a community of developers be allowed to fork the BeOS code base. Under Bandy’s proposal, Palm would receive $10 million over ten years, and get the rights to all modifications made in the fork…That’s a pretty good deal, you’d imagine, for an asset that Palm doesn’t want or need, and that has a rapidly diminishing commercial value. BeOS was last updated almost two years ago in March 2000. And it almost matches the $11m Palm paid for Be’s assets in August. Developers would pay an annual subscription in return for the right to modify the forked OS code. That would help repay Palm, with a balance to the developers. Binaries produced as a result of the work would be freely distributable. Under these sums “It’s essentially an open source model within a limited community,” says Bandy. Both Be Inc’s former CEO Jean Louis Gassée and Palm’s current hardware chief Steve Sakoman found the unusual proposal intriguing, says Bandy, but Palm clearly has no intention of letting go. Palm had asked for an upfront figure of $2 million. But that proved a stumbling block, as the fledgling “BeFork” community didn’t exist apart from on paper.” Our Take: Hmm… $2m upfront just to start negotiating…
Palm Refuses Yet Another BeOS Licensing Proposal
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
90 Comments
2002-01-17 5:36 pm
2002-01-17 7:33 pm
Are you kidding? From 1990 to 2001, Be Inc. didn’t even get $10 million of revenue combined. What are the chances that these people can get $10 million dollars to pay Palm for the next 10 years.
Shame, but reality. They have to protect investors value, and giving/licensing/opensourcing the BeOS baseline or even full/partial branches of the source tree is not going to happen. Never thought it would, it was a waste of time. But, the OS is clearly still working for me, the OS hasn’t stopped uploading porn, downloading porn, selling porn, or even consuming and enjoying porn. Reality is, the Media OS is best suited for broadband porn more than ever before. It is free, so is the online porn, and the Internet becomes even more useful each and every day. God Bless JLG and company, for making the Porn-OS == Media-OS == BeOS == PalmOS, what more can a guy ask???
but how come I’ve never heard of it before now? Has anyone else, or is it just me?
I haven’t heard of the guy before (:o), but what he proposed, was what BeUnited was proposing as well. The “closed open source model” kind of thing.
“what more can a guy ask?”
to be honest? a lot.
:O
It seems Palm is saying exactly what they’ve been saying for some time.
A media OS makes sense for the use Jerky Boyz proposes, and I think BeOS is getting closer to being a viable Pr0n OS as the BeZilla port matures. Everyone knows that Mozilla is the #1 pr0n browser, with features like built-in pop-up suppression (for those annoying site-exit banners) and effective support for a wide variety of image formats under the “libpr0n” banner.
Check out http://www.libpr0n.com/ for information on effective image viewing with Mozilla, unless it’s illegal for you to do so in your jurisdiction or you can’t take a joke.
All three groups — yellowtabs, beunited and this opennic thing — all proposed no money down, give us the source code and we will eventually split the profits with you. All three groups have highly unrealistic financial forecasts.
Palm knows better — give us an upfront payment and you can have the codes.
What makes Moz better than Opera? Opera has the disable pop-ups (or send to back), javascript, plug-ins, gif anim, embedded video & audio(a [G|g]od[ess] send ), Java and cookies, as well as identify as lots of diff browsers, all at a touch of a buttons (F12).
At my office, we sometimes pool together to buy lottery tickets if there is a big jackpot. Some of you see where I may be going with this. 🙂
RT
How about 2 million Indonesian Rupiah ?
DAMIT JIM I’M A DOCTOR NOT A PROGRAMMER………..BUT
HES DEAD JIM…….
Okay people for the love of god would you let it die. This whole Beos issue is getting pathetic, you guys have dug up the half decomposed corpse and are trying to tell everyone it just needs a shower. This is like one of those dead weekend at bernies movies.
Let me try again.
Beos it pushing up the daisys
It has passed on
It is singing with the choir invisible
It has kicked the bucket
passed of this mortal coil
It is no more
it has gone to meet its maker
bereft of life it has passed on
This OS would not vomp if you put 10 million volts into it.
Bow your head and lets have a moment os silence………………………
……………………………………………………………. ….
……………………………………………………………. ….
Ashes to ashes dust to dust……. and all that.
Now we have cookies and punch in the next room, lets try to say some nice things to the widow. Flowers should be placed next to your computer.
From the article: “It’s the standard capitalisation line: we have an asset, we’re not going to do anything with it, but we’re not going to let you have it.”
Or in 8-year-oldese: “Nyeh nyeh ne nyeh nyeh”!
Seriously, even with the lack of any guarantee that Palm would see even a part of the $10 million offered, the behavior appears puzzling from the outside looking in. Of course management has no obligation to explain, except perhaps to their shareholders, but consider: Market capitalization of Palm was $780 million at the stock price’s 52-week low, today it is $2.39 billion; cash on the balance sheet was $242 million at the end of the most recently reported quarter, with no debt. Bottom line: The $11 million Palm paid for the Be assets is little more than chump change.
If the value that Palm management is able to add to their basic business justifies the (small) price for Be’s assets, and they may be able to get some low-risk gravy by licensing its use in a totally unrelated business, then why not take the offer, or seek a higher bidder? Even Eugenia’s theory that they were scared off by the rabid Be-user community loses something when you really think about it. These are businessmen running a $1+ billion (sales) company, right?
What exactly is your point?
The point is that during 1990 – 2001, Be Inc. didn’t even generate 10 million dollars of revenue combined. So you are telling Palm that should give the source code to these people who doesn’t understand ecomonics 101.
NGE sold less than 300 copies of Corum III. Dane Scott sold 100 copies of TuneTracker. It’s not some low-risk gravy licensing deal — it’s a sure thing that these opennic people can’t even generate the funds to cover the legal costs in drawing up the contract.
Seek another bidder? Be Inc. tried to sell it to anyone for over a year, and nobody except Palm would be give them a second look.
Oh, I get it. Just like Jesus.
(Disclaimer – I’m an atheist)
In the SEC filling, I think in the final breakdown, Palm paid ~$800,000 for the BeOS source code. Now, they ask $2m. Upfront. Except the money they would get from the rest of the deal. Good business…
Eugenia — that’s just an accounting allocation of their costs of buying Be’s IP assets for taxation purposes.
Basically Palm allocated 800K for the IP assets and the rest of 11 million dollars to goodwill. And in this case, the engineers represents the goodwill. Different assets have different amortization treatments when they calculate taxes.
geez, wonder if there will be a blurp on YellowTab tommarow saying they folderd or Palm sent them a message.
Well, at least theres good communication going with Palm, not what people want but more than Be gave.
Well, I got alot of pennies in some jars. I’ll put them forward.
Palm is giving STRONG NO’S because they don’t want Be fanatics to start yet another pointless petition on the internet.
That I was trying to make in a humurous way,(humor it is a difficult concept, we learn by doing– Adrm Kirk to Savik) ,is that Beos is now dead.
I have my copy in a drawer. I plan on donating it to a museum in 10 years.
How many times does Beos need to be pronounced dead before people accept the answer? 1, 3 , 50000 times?
Palm has made its desision. The offer was made, the answer was no, so then people asked again. Palm said NO!!!!! again. How many times does Palm have to say NO before people understand NO means NO, now go away and stop asking.
What part of NO are people not understanding?
It means the opposite of yes, as in can we have the source code? Answer, NO NO NO.
At some point its time to quit and move on. I think this is that point.
…and buy Anonymous from xxx.sympatico.ca a login…
Palm said NO!!!!! again. How many times does Palm have to say NO before people understand NO means NO, now go away and stop asking.
I agree.
Now, to quote my /. sig..
http://open-beos.sf.net“>BeOS [ sf.net ] 😉
“but how come I’ve never heard of it before now? Has anyone else, or is it just me?”
Ehm…it’s ‘TheRegister’…/me grabs a fist full of salt.
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=629187&forum_id=10…
Can this really be done?
Time to move I’m afraid. I have been a Be fan right back since before the BeBox came out. I started one of the very first Be related BBSs (that’s how long ago it was). Let’s face it, for whatever reason, Be failed (we could debate the reasons all day I guess). They’ve had a long time (must be at least seven years?) to state their case and sell their product. Be was not that successful as a commercial product, so why the interest now?
I think one point few people realise is that there is quite a bit of similarity between the desktop BeOS code base and that of the new Palm OS (basically BeOS modified). There is NO WAY Palm are going to give that source out. Period.
(At least not without huge bucks up front first).
By the way I don;t think the BeFork concept would work. Let’s think about it. I PAY to WORK on a codebase that I can;t make any money from. Hellooo !
While I don;t think it is a totally bad concept, some people would be prepared to pay to get their hands on the codebase, it wouldn;t generate $10Mill EVER!
In summary I have to agree with the first poster (anon from sympatico). Also his figures on number of software products sold are a true dose of reality. If you are an individual/small company can _sell_ 500 units on any platform these days you are doing extremely well.
Finally, my take on the YellowTab deal is that it won;t happen. They will probably still be able to provide some added value to exisitng Be owners though.
Let’s face it the best multimedia OS today is MS Windows (or possibly MacOSX).
Codefire
LET IT DIE, OH MY GOD LET IT DIE, people say DOS is dead but people still use it. They said the Amiga was dead yet they’ve had one one OS upgrade and are expecting another. the fact is stuff doesn’t die it goes into recession and comes back or hangs around like a ghost of it’s former self.
If everyone who downloaded a copy of BeOS sends $10 or €10 we’ll have enough to negotiate with Palm.
If Be was not able to sell BeOS to OEMs because of MSFT illegal contracts, what makes some other groups think the can?
Could it Be that they’re gearing up for the possibility that the barriers will Be lifted soon?
Well, Palm can do the same and rip the profits themselves can’t they?
Long Live BeOS, in handhelds and/or on desktops!
ciao
yc
yc, I have to ask – have any of your prognostications ever come true? I mean, it’s great to be an optimist but just because something makes sense doesn’t mean it will come true. Experience has shown me that because something makes sense it won’t come true (at least in the business world).
My hat’s off to you as the world’s most optimistic person.
Ciao!
Palm said no to people that don’t want to give upfront cash for the source code. Do you think id Software or Epic or whatever will give you the source to the Quake engines or Unreal Engine without seeing money upfront? No. Same as with any company licensing a product.
People want BeOS source for nothing, corporations don’t work that way. It’s like saying how about you give me that car and I’ll pay you if people pay me to rent it. Doesn’t work in the real world.
I myself have a dedicated box to BeOS, and I own a Palm. And won’t stop using either one.
Maybe Palm sees opportunity in BeOS after the Microsoft lawsuit is settled.
Maybe other OS’s will be able to get to OEMs in the boot sector.
Maybe Palm’s development for their handhelds will be useable on other platforms as well.
Maybe Palm wants to make BeOS on their own.
*MAYBE* Monkeys will fly out of my butt.
-Jason
>>Let’s face it the best multimedia OS today is MS Windows (or possibly MacOSX).
<<
Windows XP is not exactly what you would call a ‘multimedia’ OS. Yeah it’s good for sending emails, typing up a few Word docs and such. Now Mac OS X on the other hand is about as close as you can get true multimedia (though I think BeOS could have probably done it better). Anyways Microsoft has a longs ways to go in the multimedia area, as for Apple… they been there, done that, and got the t-shirt!!!
i agree with mlk.
😛
>>yc, I have to ask – have any of your prognostications ever come true?
Actually Yes! it doesn’t happen every day but it does happen. For example, after BeOS DR8, I saw potential in BeOS for a great desktop OS and invested a nice chunk of change the day of the IPO, I invested a bit more as BeOS went down below $4 because I simply Believed, I later sold at 33+ for a nice chunk of profit.
I am still long BeOS and Palm!
>>Experience has shown me that because something makes sense it won’t come true.
That is true. That’s where the “gamble” comes in. By nature, I don’t give up very easily. Just think of how glorious it would Be to see the Phoenix in BeOS shine brighter yet someday.
It’s not impossible! Although I would love to get R6 now, I honestly believe that what Palm is doing right now considering their handheld situation and the desktop OS market condition, is logically the right thing to do.
>>My hat’s off to you as the world’s most optimistic person.
Thanks!
The reason for my optimism is that when I honestly trace Be Inc’s existance, I can’t honestly chastise the board for the decisions that they made. I might have taken a different gambles such as persisting on breaking Microsoft’s barrier on the desktop market but what would that have gotten me? Perhaps an R6 release with no market, no funding, no takeover bid and bankrupcy staring me in the face.
I believe that Palm people (past and present) are smart! They have managed thus far to keep their edge in the handheld market over Microsoft. Many of the people who work there now, care very much about BeOS. I believe that if and when there is a good desktop opportunity, they will take it. I also believe that today, the desktop OS market is no different than it was when Be was hit with the deadly Microsoft contracts from the OEMs.
Long Live BeOS, in handhelds and/or desktops!
ciao
yc
Maybe Palm sees opportunity in BeOS after the Microsoft lawsuit is settled.
Maybe other OS’s will be able to get to OEMs in the boot sector.
Maybe Palm’s development for their handhelds will be useable on other platforms as well.
Maybe Palm wants to make BeOS on their own.
*MAYBE* Monkeys will fly out of my butt.
I would pay to see them all come true.
Actually, the addition of just one modern, strandards-compliant web browser would add a lot of mileage to BeOS, even without Palm. Will I ever see BeZilla do more than load its own page?
yc, you made money on the stock because blind BeOS fans bought into the stock at the $30’s range — for the red hat buyout rumour that never had any truth into it. There was never a potential at all.
>>you made money on the stock because blind BeOS fans bought into the stock at the $30’s range — for the red hat buyout rumour that never had any truth into it. There was never a potential at all.
Not exactly, BeOS was in the mid teens even without the RedHat rummor. Had it not been for the Microsoft’s illegal contracts with the OEMs Be Inc. would have done very well! It ain’t over yet!
ciao
yc
The price of Be Inc. shares hit the teen’s in Nov 1999 — shortly after Sakoman was appointed to be the general manager of web appliance business — so it had nothing to do with microsoft at all.
Though I am not a fan of the The Register, my Linux (Guru) friend and colleague just happen to run across this today as he was testing Netscape 6.2 on his newly configured Linux Box. I am not sure how true or what to make of the story. But supposedly the Korean Government has booted Microsoft solutions to the curb for Linux solutions instead. More of the story can be found here. So this must be a major victory for the Linux folks indeed.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23667.html
Enjoy 🙂
>>The price of Be Inc. shares hit the teen’s in Nov 1999 — shortly after Sakoman was appointed to be the general manager of web appliance business — so it had nothing to do with microsoft at all.
Yes it did! If we hit the teens without any major US OEM contracts, we would almost certainly have hit the 50s with a few OEM contracts from the likes of Dell, Compaq, IBM and HP. Even if only for home PCs at first.
ciao
yc
No — it hit the teens because Be Inc. sent Wall Street the signal that they were no longer interested in the desktop OS market.
>>No — it hit the teens because Be Inc. sent Wall Street the signal that they were no longer interested in the desktop OS market.
They shifted from the desktop market because the hit a brick wall with a 100 lbs gorilla on top of it. Had that *illegal* obstacle not been there, BeOS would certainly have been a Wall Street darling.
ciao
yc
Had that illegal obstacle not been there —- OS/2 would have ruled the world and BeOS wouldn’t have started in the first place. That’s a 2 million what if’s scenario.
Call me naive, but I just don’t get how a buggy funny Lindows project can get investment and a stable developed BeOSR6 can’t. You ask for two millons up front or you trash it? That’s maybe poker, though I bet Palm really wants to trash it (beats me why).
I don’t want to wait more than 15 seconds to boot up…and that is dead, the living ones take a minute.
And now for something completely different, ‘hope openbeos gets more tangible soon.
Actually, Be’s stock rose as the desktop platform seemed to take off. The focus shift caused a drop in the price, which continued a slow side to nothing afterward. The desktop focus is what made BEOS an interesting investment to a lot of people–it wasn’t a liability, it was an asset. True believers in the IA market were attracted after BeIA, but people who didn’t practice a “Ride the Hype” philosophy knew that IAs should have remained a sideline. The internet is only a killer app when it’s in combination with something else (to wit, Aura was a better idea than a webpad, but nobody licensed Aura), and the entire concept simply won’t break out of the Geek Chic market until high-speed internet is as ubiquitous and reliable as cable television.
And, sure, it’s easy to say that in hindsight. I was an IA curmudgeon to start with, though, raising more than a little ire on BeNews forums on occasion. Gassee has a certain kind of vision, but ultimately it may not have been the *right* kind of vision a company like Be needed. The concept needed management support for slow and steady growth, vertical market by vertical market; Gassee wanted to be, to borrow a phrase from his arch-rival, Insanely Great. The difference may ultimately be that Jobs knows hows to milk “niche player” for everything that it’s worth.
Yeah Dos is still around, so is the Amiga. These systems will stay around until there is no hardware that will run them. How many people out there would want to run Dos on their shinny new Itanium?(Is that even possible?) Will the new Amiga support the G5? How long until there is simply zero hardware support for Beos. You have a Beos disk but it won’t install on anything, would you say Beos is dead then? We are real close to that now. What do you do when your hardware dies and there is no way to get a replacement that Beos will run on?
In my mind at this point its time to stop putting resources into Beos and go with something that has a future.
Would you want to learn to program in cobol or Java and Ada?
Read the Be Inc. press release dated Nov 2, 1999 announcing Sakoman as appointed to the general manager of web appliance.
http://www.be.com/press/pressreleases/99-11-02_gm.html
Read the historical stock quote from Oct 1999 to Apri 2000, the price of Be Inc. stock rose to the teens shortly after the Sakoman announcement. The “informal” Nov 99 focus shift started the rise of Be’s stock prices.
http://table.finance.yahoo.com/t?a=10&b=15&c=99&d=04&e=16&f=00&g=d&…
>>>>You ask for two millons up front or you trash it? That’s maybe poker, though I bet Palm really wants to trash it (beats me why).
It’s not a poker bluff —- it’s just common sense.
Yellowtab’s proposal just doesn’t make any common sense — it’s in the “too good to be true” category along with the rest of the “100% natural herbal viagra — no prescription required” junkmails you received each and everyday. The whole Be Inc.’s existence between 1990 to 2001, Be Inc. didn’t even generate 10 millions of revenue (let alone profits) — so how can yellowtab generate 10 millions dollars in profits to give Palm in the next 10 years.
>>>>so how can yellowtab generate 10 millions dollars in profits to give Palm in the next 10 years.
How can Palm itself generate 10 nanomillions TRASHING IT?
Look at Palm’s SEC filings:
They allocated (for tax purposes) approx. $800K for the actual IP and the rest of the 11 million dollars for the goodwill to the whole transaction. And in this case the engineers are the goodwill.
The SEC filings also indicated that the legal costs and the investment bankers fees for this Palm-Be deal costs Palm $1.15 million.
So basically when Palm ask for 2 million dollars — they just want to get even.
You haven’t anwsered me.
>>>>>So basically when Palm ask for 2 million dollars — they just want to get even.
What about getting nothing? Cause that’s the final deal with BeOSR6.
Though we are all probably speculate the happenings, what went wrong and so forth. I believe there is 2 sides of the coin here;
1) Be Inc. never had a huge advertising campaign for BeOS, and to be honest 80% of the computing population still doesn’t know BeOS (or Be Inc. for that matter) exists or ever existed. I actually learned about BeOS thru word of mouth from my old boss saying it was going to be the next big thing. I adopted BeOS a year later.
2) Though the blame shouldn’t be pointed entirely to Microsoft’s direction, Microsoft is not exactly innocent either as Scot Hacker pointed out some months ago in his last article on Byte.com. Now Microsoft is in court for the bad things they have done in the past with their strong-arm tactics, will we see justice? Well I am not holding my breath, but hopefully Microsoft wont get away with the damage they have done to the entire computer industry.
Microsoft is starting to get a taste of its own medicine from the Linux group who have a take no prisoner attitude, serves them (Microsoft) right! And if you think that Linux can’t sneak in the back door, then you are wrong I have already seen it happen… the company I work for is a prime example.
At the end of the day, BeOS is still pretty much alive… for one it runs better on older hardware than Windows and Mac OS, and guess what that hardware is still around. OpenBeOS Group and BeUnited will keep BeOS (or OBOS) compatible with future hardware. And while HP, Compaq and Dell are wondering why PC sales keep drifting to lower and lower margins, they might open up and give the vital information that is needed (for drivers and such) to keep BeOS and others like it alive, so when someone like me and whoever else can go buy a PC, erase Windows from the hard drive and load whatever the hell we want, it being Linux, BeOS and anything that tickles the fancy!!
To blame:
1. Microsoft unfair monopolistics.
2. The DOJ that has got obsessed about the browser integration thing (integration is natural to me), when the keypoint of the case is the only-Microsoft-booting for OEMs thing.
3. Be Inc.
4. Palm Inc.
> Will the new Amiga support the G5?
Yes.
Although heterogenous parallel multiprocessing is also on the agenda for the distant future. So it should not be limited to modern day symmetric multiprocessing and should offer asymmetric multiprocessing advantages.
There`s still a long road ahead for the Amiga community however, but I think many OS geeks/power users will be amazed by future Amiga home server/desktop capabilities.
This latest message from Palm actually sounds _less_ final to me than the previous one. While $2M is not pocket change to the BeOS community, it is not that much either, all things considered. It is MUCH better than ruling out a license flat-out.
Is there anything we can do to raise $2M? I, for one, would be willing to put $500 – $1000 into something like this (assuming it was structured acceptably for the community).
Can we make something happen here?
BEOS had a lot of potential but lacked a lot of stuff to make it attractive to a wider audience. How do you want to convince an OEM to install it if even a simple task like browsing the Web is far behind Windows. Why would an OEM bother install BEOS? For a handful of passionates which by the way most of the time do not buy major brand computers! And many more users would have been confused by that “Which system do you want to boot?”. Come on, Microsoft boot loader policy is just a lame excuse from BE.
About Palm not licensing BEOS, I guess the business plans does not look very serious. Palm probably estimated that the few thousand dollars that they might eventually get from that licensing are not worse the trouble they might run into (both Technically, legally and Marketing).
Also Palm has never been in the Desktop OS business. Even the engineers they got from BEOS are probably not Desktop OS specialist. So Palm want to concentrate on what they know how to do: handheld computer market. The competition is fierce enough in that market without being distracted by going into another market where you do not have any knowledge. I think BE made enough mistakes by not concentrating their effort into one market (4 focus shift, a record!), I guess Palm is a smarter.
When one gets down to it financially it doesn’t make sense to not license to somebody, since there appears to be some demand. As has been pointed out the intellectual property wasn’t free. Provided that the cost of licensing to a third party was less than royalties that were made that would be a positive return of investment. I think that Palm is just looking to insure that they don’t license the code out for way less than what they could get someone to pay. Who blames them? The thinking is that if someone is willing to pay a few million it would be illogical to give the code away for next to nothing.
In high-tech 1 million can turn to 0 next year, you cannot hold an OS undefintely expecting a better deal, each day passing your non developed OS is lesser valuable. A lot of months have past since BeOSR6 was coded and to this date Palm is either playing poker or trashing for good any future revenue.
>>How do you want to convince an OEM to install it if even a simple task like browsing the Web is far behind Windows.
NetPositive was a great start although behind IE just like IE was far behind Netscape. With a opportunity to to sell to OEMs, the whole OS would have improved.
BeOS has some clear advantage over Windows architecturally. If DOS was able to sell when a Macintosh was available, I have no doubt that BeOS would have sold well with in the presence of bloated winblows.
ciao
yc
How about this? It’s a way to get the $2 million needed to get Palm to negotiate.
1. Bill Gates buys the Be IP from Palm. He’s rich, he can totally afford it.
2. He sells it to the BeFork company for any price he chooses, such as a stick of gum and a handshake.
3. Palm gets their money back.
4. BeFork gets the code.
5. Bill Gates gets a stick of gum and a handshake. Who wouldn’t want that? He doesn’t even feel the $2 million come out of his deep, deep pockets.
6. Microsoft gets competition, since the best damn OS in history is now effectively open source, courtesy of BeFork.
7. Now without a leg to stand on, what’s left of the antitrust case disappears overnight. Microsoft can ring up the tab and put their lawyers away.
Think it’ll work? Yeah, I didn’t think so, either.
just like investing in Corel and Apple, go Bill go, suck it all
>>>>>So basically when Palm ask for 2 million dollars — they just want to get even.
<<<<What about getting nothing? Cause that’s the final deal with BeOSR6.
Hey the other anonymous,
The yellowtab is proposing a “no money down and you give us the source code right away deal”. Combine with their voodoo business plan, Palm will get less than ZERO dollars — because Palm has to pay for the legal fees to draw up the contract.
Hey thats great that the Amiga will support the 64 bit G5.
Will the Amiga be 64 bit clean or a mix of older 32 bit stuff?
Most importantly if I wanted to run the new Amiga system on a G5 how would I go about it?
I know of zero companys selling PPC systems other than Apple.
I would love to build or buy a PPC box and make it Linux Amiga dual boot.
Can you point me at some vendors?
I’m sure someone like Larry Ellison could afford a couple of million to buy BeOS and put it into the community – just to annoy Microsoft!
Anyone want to give him a call or an email? Hehe!
My Anonymous pair, are you sure YellowTab’s deal is accurately as you describe it?, I fear not, there must be some initial cost, although not 2M.
My, how things have changed, just try to imagine Jobs and Wozniak talking about legal fees to release AppleI. When Gates and co hacked QDOS they had less than Yellotab, I guess that is what you understand by voodo plans.
You guys really ought to have a moderating system for these forums to take care of some of these trolls.
[this is not in response to anyone in particular, just a general reply to a lot of the things i’ve seen posted]
I went to Dsiney world in october and the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt spectacular attraction thingy was run by beos on 22 of there computers it was pretty cool i had to walk up the the little av booth thingy and see if i was right and i was.
in general the current system works fine except for a few cases.<BR>
1) Slashdot news. If any story draws a slashdot crowd, the trolls follow. These are the nasty trolls that can be quite profane.<BR>
2) BeOS news. BeOS news seems to draw more posters than any other kind of story. Along with that benefit comes a whole heard of anonymous posters. Most of the people that post to these stories are old BeOS users and/or programmers. Some of them troll too, but most of the trolls are anonymous.<BR>
The rest of the stories here are lucky to get 10 posts, but usually every one is intelligent. The ratio of posts that are intelligent also goes up dramatically when a story is more technical.
Where does this story mention that Yellowtab put forward a proposal to Palm ?
I can’t read it anywhere.
wtf was palm thinking?
oh, yeah, and BeOS is dead.
Long live OBOS? OBOS doesn’t exist yet. In all probability, it probably won’t ever exist.
>>>>When Gates and co hacked QDOS they had less than Yellotab, I guess that is what you understand by voodo plans.
No — what Bill Gates did was: trying to license QDOS to IBM when he hadn’t actually purchase QDOS from its creators yet. And also Bill Gates was making real money since he was in high school selling his class scheduling program to his high school. Even then Gates had more real business experiences than these characters at yellowtab.
>>I would love to build or buy a PPC box and make it Linux Amiga dual boot.
Can you point me at some vendors?<<
Your best bet is probably start at Motorola or IBM’s website and work you way down, a few other people like PowerMax (www.powermax.com) and such that build Mac upgrades maybe have solutions that could be helpful.
I did talk to one of Motorola’s reps about getting PPC parts and he said it’s possible to build your own PPC box, but it’s chasing down the parts that’s a pain!
Happy Hunting 🙂
The $2 million dollar figure is from The Register article.
Quote:
>>>>Both Be Inc’s former CEO Jean Louis Gassée and Palm’s current hardware chief Steve Sakoman found the unusual proposal intriguing, says Bandy, but Palm clearly has no intention of letting go. Palm had asked for an upfront figure of $2 million. But that proved a stumbling block, as the fledgling “BeFork” community didn’t exist apart from on paper.
>>>>Another pitfall that emerged was that the new co-op would have had to pay Be Inc’s winding up costs: essentially, it could have found itself paying the shareholders directly. You can read details of version 1.0 of Bandy’s proposal here.
Guess what —- Be’s winding up costs is about 7 million dollars. (i.e. Be got 11 million dollars from Palm but Be’s shareholders will only get 3.8 million dollars after the bills are paid —- therefore Be’s winding up costs is 7.2 million dollars.) I guess Bandy never figured that out.
I don’t buy the same operating system if exist only in bundle with new hardware.
I don’t like Apple, and I don’t like Palm too.
>>>I think one point few people realise is that there is quite a bit of similarity between the desktop BeOS code base and that of the new Palm OS (basically BeOS modified). There is NO WAY Palm are going to give that source out. Period. (At least not without huge bucks up front first).<<<
Probably so..
But I must say that it’d be really cool if several
years down the road Palm was able to spin off something
that was capable of running on modern desktop hardware
and was 100% compatible with all PalmOS software. It could
probably be done if they require applications written for
the PalmOS to adhere to a set of standards that would
eventually work with fat binaries or something ala what
Micro$oft attempted to do with Win95NT. It would have
worked too if it weren’t for the large number of programmers
who noticed that Win3.x programs generally ran without
too many problems in Win95.
Of course I’m just dreaming here, but isn’t it customary
to say all kinds of nice things about the deceased at a wake?
I really don’t think PalmOS is BeOS modified. It’s probably a derivative of BeIA. BeOS is probably going to be used for the development platform.
The development platform for PalmOS was, is and will be Microsoft Windows.
>>The development platform for PalmOS was, is and will be Microsoft Windows.<<
Who cares?!!
<em>The development platform for PalmOS was, is and will be Microsoft Windows.</em>
Actually, the Palm software was originally developed on Macintoshes. The Windows Palm development environment is a port of the Machintosh software.
(Yes, I know, I am responding to a troll two cowardly to attach his name to his posting)
There isn’t a PowerPC Amiga. You have to get a regular Amiga and then bolt on a PowerPC accelerator, so that some of your newer software can run partly on the PPC chip while the OS and other key components run on the 68K native CPU.
The resulting bodge doesn’t run Linux (except on the 68K CPU) and last time I looked it didn’t even run NetBSD, so you probably don’t need or want it.
There are always PLANS for a PowerPC Amiga, but 5 years of failures should be enough to discourage you from holding your breath until there’s a working one in the room with you. Even when the AmigaOne arrives it will still be something that you plug into a working Amiga, unless you like staring at a blank screen.
There are both Linux Debian and RedHat PPC distributions available for PPC powered Amigas. However as with the 68k versions it will not make much sense for the average user to use Linux instead of AmigaOS on their systems. Where AmigaOS will fly on your machine Linux will crawl. Even when emulating AmigaOS on x86 hardware its outperforms Linux distributions with ease.
AmigaOS is basicly already ported to PPC (complete rewrite of exec to PPC). Some finishing touches are being added and refined before AmigaOS 4.0 will be released onto the Amiga market end February.
And regarding the AmigaOne you are wrong. It offers you the ability to add an A1200 motherboard to allow full AGA compatibility, it will also function standalone. AmigaOS 4.x is also being ported to other PPC motherboards and will even work with the current range of PPC powered Amigas. Although to get the most out of AmigaOS you will need these new motherboards as they allow better CPUs, offer PCI/AGP slots instead of bottlenecking Zorro-PCI bridges used in Amigas today. (ATI Radeon, Voodoo3, Permedia3 and Matrox graphic chipsets will initially be supported.)
anyone still wondering why there is no opera port for palm OS. someone mentioned this before. I’ll do it again.
To run beos on your desktop in the future you are really looking at getting motherboard support (ARM chip) for the “palm OS 5” and drivers for peripherals.
Yeah Amiga still rulez. Even on ancient hardware AmigaOS can do amazing things. Should be nice to see what the new Amiga team can do, especially considering that BeOS has gone down the drain. The AmigaDE is already proving to be a very innovative product, bring on AmigaOS 4 and beyond! 🙂
Take a look at Micha`s homepage http://www.amiga-linux.de.vu/“