Current Owner of BeOS Code Claims Zeta is Illegal

Hank Powers writes "The legal status of the Zeta operating system that was derived from the source code Be Inc. left shortly before going bankrupt has been unclear for several years. Now, the current owner of the source code, ACCESS, claims "if Herr Korz feels that he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he's been using, we're completely unaware of it, and I'd be fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that claim". The sales of Zeta have been suspended and so has the development been halted as well. OSNews has an article about the recent developments."

Nothing to see here, yadda yadda...

[pla]

Now, the current owner of the source code, ACCESS, claims "if Herr Korz feels that he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he's been using, we're completely unaware of it, and I'd be fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that claim".

Perhaps some insider can make this issue more clear (yes, I R'd TFA), but this seems like a non-issue. As I understand it...

This company ACCESS legitimately owns the rights to BeOS. Korz/YellowTAB never had any right to continue work on it as Zeta, and may even have started the project based on leaked source code. But PalmSource never cared, and YellowTAB never bothered doing more than sending nastygrams every few months, probably because they saw no possible financial incentive to do so.

So overall, this sounds an awfully lot like ACCESS has zero interest in BeOS/Zeta(/Haiku?), but their lawyers have advised them to send a periodic reminder of "oh, BTW, we own this", just so they can eat the whole thing on the off chance it ever becomes commercially viable.



So... Why does this count as news? It seems like just the status quo for the past six years, nothing new here.

Access Microsoft

[Doc Ruby]

Access, the company now stifling innovation with the dormant BeOS code, is also the Japanese mobile phone corporate giant that bought out PalmOS, lying about offering a smartphone running Linux with a PalmOS GUI/compatibility layer.

Funny how they keep spending money on OS'es that they never profit from. Their mission seems to be to kill OS'es that have a chance to innovate around Microsoft's monopoly. I wonder whether their license to deploy Windows phones in Japan was contingent on doing that kind of Microsoft dirty work, perhaps even secretly funded (or subsidized) by Microsoft.

Re:Nothing to see here, yadda yadda...

[aussie_a]

If this truly was happening periodically for the past 6 years, why is development and sales being halted now? Does this also happen periodically?

Access Microsoft-It's conspiracy time.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Funny how they keep spending money on OS'es that they never profit from. Their mission seems to be to kill OS'es that have a chance to innovate around Microsoft's monopoly. I wonder whether their license to deploy Windows phones in Japan was contingent on doing that kind of Microsoft dirty work, perhaps even secretly funded (or subsidized) by Microsoft."

You'd never be able to prove it, and making a public accussation will get you in "libal" trouble.

Re:Access Microsoft

[Doc Ruby]

The other big case the Clinton Department of Justice won against a monopoly/cartel was against Big Tobacco. It's now coming to light that Bush's Justice Department interfered with the followthru [google.com]. As part of their now obvious process of coporatizing the Justice Department to serve monopolies like Microsoft. I expect it's only a matter of time before we learn how Bush deliberately ditched the MS monopoly judgement. His favorite lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, got his lobbyist career started at Preston, Gates, Bill Gates III's father's law firm. I expect there's a lot more to the story, all bad.

Re:Owner of the code - but they're not using it!

[tji]

They own the code. They can do whatever they want with it.

I was a big fan of BeOS. I went to their first demo-tour in Ann Arbor, way back when. I never bought a dual processor PowerPC BeBox, but I did install and use it once it became available for intel. So, I think their letting BeOS whither and die is a HUGE waste of all that good code, with incredible multimedia capabilities and many other advances that are still not met in Mac OS or Linux (and certainly not Windows).

When they were negotiating with Apple, I was ready to make the jump to Mac OS. (I eventually moved to Mac OS (NeXTStep based), after a while, because it was the best available desktop OS). When Palm bought the code, I was ready to more to using Palm devices. But, since they never released a product based on it, I never bought a Palm.

I, too would love to see a BeOS operating system available. But, it's their code. They are under no responsibility to release it, allow other people to benefit from it, or release the code. Such is life.

Re:Owner of the code - but they're not using it!

[Britz]

Actually BeOS went down because of the lack of apps. Adobe never ported Photoshop and Steinberg never ported Cubase even though there was talk about both. Maybe a company with a fruit as its logo had something to do with the Photoshop port never coming through, but I dunno, maybe some other Slashdotter can shed some light on the history of BeOS.

With the current free software that rivals proprietary software in both quality and features in many fields and that seems to be made for porting fringe operating systems seem to stand a much better chance. Just look at Ubuntu. Personally I am running Debian as my desktop OS.

Parent may not be right about Access being responsible for the downfall of BeOS, but now, that BeOS actually may have a chance (I heard that Firefox was ported for example) they may be responsible for it never coming back.

Re:Nothing to see here, yadda yadda...

[iminplaya]

If we're going to treat IP as real property, then we need laws against speculation. "Use it or lose it" is what we should be demanding. Same goes for the Alpha chip. When the question of why we still use x86 was asked a while ago, the answer should have been clear right away. "It's the law."

Re:open-source project is immune

[nurb432]

And beacuse its open source it means it magically cant be infected with other peoples IP?

I'm surprised people consider BeOS to have value

[argent]

Several years back when I had the chance to try out the various versions of BeOS on the hardware available at that time, it wasn't significantly better than its contemproraries. The file system was interesting, but having applications depend on features of the file system is a great way to create a software ghetto, like the Mac was before OS X: metadata about the file belongs in the file system. Metadata about the contents of the file belongs in files. The object oriented API might have been interesting, but it was too heavily based on an oddball OO language that was particularly hard to work with: C++. The kernel was intended to be part of a "Media OS", but it didn't make any attempt to provide real-time support.

There were some nice features in the shell (Tracker), but they could have been implemented on a conventional OS.

Performance was poor. The only OS it outperformed on the same hardware was the classic Mac OS... Windows, Windows NT, OpenStep, and open source UNIX were all faster. Of course the contemporary Mac OS was near its nadir of performance.

When the rumors of Apple picking it up, I was somewhat hopeful... it was definitely better than what they had.

When Palm picked it up I was horrified. Palm's existing OS was far better suited for the PDA, and it was looking like Palm was going to end up with some really nice and cheap handhelds... if yo could get a Palm to retail for under $50 (a target they could have easily met and suprassed by now) everyone would be using them in high school instead of calculators, and they'd have no competition. But instead of doing what they did best, they decided to go after Microsoft on Microsoft's turf... and went from an easily-maintained 80% of the handheld market to "who's going to buy them"?

BeOS? It's a poison pill. The Amiga of the '90s, without the virtue of EVER having had a hope in hell.