Haiku Archive

Be, Inc. announced that the stockholders of Be have approved the sale of substantially all of its intellectual property and other technology assets to a subsidiary of Palm, Inc., pursuant to the terms of a previously announced asset purchase agreement between Be and Palm. The stockholders of Be have also approved the proposed dissolution of Be pursuant to the terms of a plan of dissolution. It is anticipated that the transaction with Palm will close within the next two business days. We hope that the sale of Be's IP to Palm will have a positive outcome regarding the BeOS and the BeUnited effort to license the BeOS source code.

Forcing a developer to use multithreading, which is pretty complex for most programmers to code for, it is the wrong way to go for an OS. There was some controversy about this, but at the end, the experienced programmers agreed. And Maarten Hekkelman, of the Pepper fame (Maarten is also the same person who wrote the BeOS debugger when he was hired by Be to do so), seems to agree too: There won't be a Pepper for BeOS, just because the BeOS design does not make it easy to code such a big and complex app. Before you start replying in this story, make sure you read all the comments here. Our Take: I love BeOS, but BeOS is not perfect. In fact, what Be's marketing was trying to sell as the best feature of BeOS, pervasive multithreading, it is also its most weak spot. Now you know why big apps crashing too much under BeOS, and why there are not many big apps available anyway. Too hard to code big apps for such an environment, for most developers. Take Scooby for example. This person's multithreading code, is far below par, and mind you, Mr Takamatsu is an experienced developer. Scooby still crashes too much though and locks up the app_server at times, in a spaghetti multithreading confusion... Same goes for Gim-ICQ and lots of other apps.Update: Maarten Hekkelman responded to our comment section explaining his decision and Pepper's design.

ZDNews is reporting the end of the (short-lived) SONY eVilla by September 13th. Sony executives blamed the demise on "stability and usability" problems with the $499 desktop IA, but did not offer specifics. "The product did not meet our expectations," Sony spokesman John Dolak said. "It did not operate as planned." There were a lot of user reports that the appliance was slow and not stable. Also, in the ZDNews article is clearly stated that Palm has no plans to continue development of the BeIA, endorsing even more David Nagel yesterday's answer that Palm bought Be for the engineering team and not for the technology. Our Take: eVilla was slow because of two things: because of the very slow CPU (266 Mhz Cyrix which has the power of Intel Pentium 166) and because the graphics chip (incorporated in the CPU) could not handle the high resolution of 800x1024 with enough speed, especially because the monitor is a normal SONY 15", but rotated (make sure you read this thread to understand why the rotation is an overkill). As for the stability issues (which they were indeed, I can personally verify that), it just seemed that there were some technical issues with BeIA, which we may not know about.

In his latest (and final) BeView column for Byte.com, Scot Hacker takes a harsh look at the way Microsoft's Windows Licensing Agreement has affected Be's business with Hitachi and other PC vendors, as well the entire OEM hardware landscape. While the Hitachi relationship was no secret, this is the first time Be has divulged way in which Microsoft's sinister bootloader license kept BeOS from shipping on dual-boot machines from Hitachi, Dell, Compaq, and Micron. Be, Inc. nearly had deals with other major OEMs, and this is the first time JLG has told the complete story of Be's involvement with the DOJ case against Microsoft. Hacker adds: "I had a final column farewell attached to the end of the piece, but Byte removed it for some reason. So, quickly: It's been a great ride with Byte, and I'd like to thank all of the readers who have supported the column over the past 2.5 years. There is still life beyond Windows!"