Current Owner of BeOS Code Claims Zeta is Illegal 140
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."
Re:Access Microsoft (Score:1, Informative)
Obviously you are very mistaken [linuxdevices.com].
Re:Access Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously you didn't read the article to which you linked:
In other words, no PalmOS on their Linux phone. They've been "planning" it for years. They announced they'd be releasing it in 2006. 2007 will be at least half over, and they'll still be "planning" it. Liars.
Wishing doesn't make it so, for you either.
Re:Access Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
And when PalmSource did release their new Palm OS (Cobalt), despite a subsequent revision, supposedly at the request of Palm OS licensees, it died because PalmOne (current day "Palm Inc.") weren't interested in the OS they paid for in the first place. No one else wanted to launch an OS clearly superior to PalmOS 5, WinCE and probably the Linux mobile offerings of the day and Cobalt died a silent death.
All the licenses bar Palm Inc, and GSPDA didn't launch any further devices, only one has joined (Jaina) and launched since, leading to M$ dominating, not by monopoly, but because they actually have a clue how to co-operate with licensees - not to mention a programming environment which doesn't niche market industry programmers running.
PalmSource, realizing this, bought China MobileSoft to concentrate on Linux phones, then was bought by ACCESS, *after Palm lost the bidding race for the IP it use to own*, who, presumably, believes the future is high-end mass-market phones.
Now we have a situation where Palm Inc is selling Windows Mobile based devices as a sheer result on stupidity by Ed Colligan and Co after Handspring and Palm merged.
For those who didn't read: ACCESS doesn't have that much to do with the lack of a legal, original BeOS based environment. Palm Inc. paid for it, split, killed it by proxy, ACCESS doesn't want anything to do with it other than any concrete IP.
Funny how I submitted this on Wednesday evening... (Score:5, Informative)
Gotta love slashdot. I also seem to have recalled explaining a few more things in my summary that would have prevented the fringe element from heading off into conspiracy land as well....
First off, the reason why ACCESS is only *now* responding on this issue is because Korz was making overtures towards open sourcing the code--something that ACCESS could not keep silent about. As Lefty says in his comments both at bitsofnews and OSNews.com, they'd been sending cease and desist letters for some time already and Korz was ignoring them. To try and take legal action would be only to invite lawsuits over code that ACCESS saw no income from; so why should they stick out their necks for a libel suit with the possibility of generating only negative income? It is only because ACCESS wanted to prevent any possibility of Korz giving away their property they chose to risk the possible libel suit now.
Secondly, 'Zeta' was a dead parrot. It was NOT truly being developed, because obviously Korz did NOT have access (pun unintended) to the source code or he would have done more with it. The only true successor to BeOS is Haiku, which as I stated in my summary is nearing its 1.0 release with all originally developed closed-room re-engineered code that is BeOS R5 compatible.
Third, BeOS Max PE which is developed by a Greek coder to be the best and most updated (using bits of third party hacks and including newer drivers for more hardware as well as bits of Haiku that work better than the old BeOS parts) may be forced to discontinue development. This is something that would be a tragedy, since it is thanks to Vaspar's work on this (free) project many of us are able to run BeOS on new hardware. And I say that as someone who bought BeOS in the store almost a month or two before the announcement they were going bankrupt.
--bornagainpenguin
Re:Nothing to see here, yadda yadda... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:open-source project is immune (Score:4, Informative)
Re:open-source project is immune (Score:4, Informative)
Re:open-source project is immune (Score:3, Informative)