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[News] BeOS back on trackANN.lu
Posted on 29-Sep-2003 18:02 GMT by Hagge25 comments
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Or well, at least sort of. Our friends over at slashdot have noticed that yellowtab (google cache) finally has started to sell their Zeta solution, which in short can be seen as an upgrade/update of whatever BeOS was then Be inc went away. This includes hardware aswell, both desktops and laptops. For the time beeing they only sell to Europe.
BeOS back on track : Comment 1 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Bill Hoggett on 29-Sep-2003 16:12 GMT
I've never quite seen proper clarification of the copyright issues involved. Have yellowTab bought the rights to BeOS, or are they just assuming it's "abandonware" and can be built on by whoever feels like it.

I've seen various enhanced BeOS copies, and pretty much all of them are illegal when it comes down to it. What is yellowTab's position?
BeOS back on track : Comment 2 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 29-Sep-2003 16:16 GMT
make sure to read first comment thread ;)
BeOS back on track : Comment 3 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 29-Sep-2003 16:18 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (Bill Hoggett):
I don't know, I thought most of the new beosstuff used the free personal edition and added more features to them? But i think there is some code-wannabes aswell.
And I don't think you can call it abandonware since palm bought beos, didn't they?
BeOS back on track : Comment 4 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Bill Hoggett on 29-Sep-2003 16:33 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (Hagge):
@Hagge

It seems YellowTAB bought a license from Be just before they sold up to Palm. It's a bit unclear how much of this Zeta is new code and how much is unreleased but ancient code from the Be days.

What is REALLy unclear is where the future of such a product lies. How far does their license go?

I must admit that a slightly updated BeOS is not particularly exciting, and I speak as a BeOS 5 owner. Things have moved on, and BeOS both looks and feels outdated these days.
BeOS back on track : Comment 5 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Legion on 29-Sep-2003 17:12 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Bill Hoggett):
Ah, BeOS. My second love.

Bill: Outdated? you realize you're posting on an AMIGA message board, right? =)
Personally, I with them luck. I have the new max edition on my old K7 box. It's still a great OS for day to day stuff.

Just waiting for OS4 now...
BeOS back on track : Comment 6 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 29-Sep-2003 17:39 GMT
BeOS history - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=80368&cid=7084315
BeOS back on track : Comment 7 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 29-Sep-2003 17:43 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Bill Hoggett):
Yes, you are right:

Then came the announcement that Palm had purchased Be's intellectual propert(IP)... and were not going to continue development of BeOS. Luckily (in my opinion), Bernd was smart enough apparently to ask for a license to the source and not to purchase it. So, before Be sold their IP to Palm, they gave some sort of full license to yellowTAB to release new products based on the source code. Presumably that license just transferred to Palm's ownership with everything else.

--

And I don't like the look either.
However, that system is made from the gronud up to be a multimedia os, it just don't try to be one like all the open source oses, windows, macosx and so on.
I also think they had quite decent and simple APIs, so an updated BeOS might be good. BBRV, will we see a zeta port for the pegasos any time soon? =D
BeOS back on track : Comment 8 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 29-Sep-2003 17:47 GMT
BeOS journal review of zeta os beta5 - http://www.beosjournal.org/?ct=r&ru=2003-06-03-zetab5
BeOS back on track : Comment 9 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 29-Sep-2003 18:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Hagge):
I've read the review and only thing I can say is that I will probably start using it on my x86 as soon as possible, but of course I want to be able to try it out for free first.
Currently I use BSD and there might be a few BSD tools I would still like to have, but I guess i can manage to live without them and us SSH to another box aswell.
BeOS back on track : Comment 10 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by takemehomegrandma on 29-Sep-2003 19:54 GMT
How many BeOS "distributions" are there/will there be?
BeOS back on track : Comment 11 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 29-Sep-2003 20:17 GMT
In reply to Comment 10 (takemehomegrandma):
Seems like it's four.

yellowtab zeta based on beos
openbeos as a new opensource version with a goal in binary compatibility
some other attempt with linux and x, who cares ;)
and yet another, an athena fork.
only two first counts ;)
BeOS back on track : Comment 12 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 30-Sep-2003 06:29 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (Hagge):
The "media OS" thing was and is just hype. If you have lemons, call them "citrus burst capsules" and double the price.

Yes, the Be filesystem can theoretically handle quite large files such as a full-length high quality movie... but unfortunately this was never properly finished, so it's liable to crash the computer, and it causes allocation problems "Disk full? But I have twice that much space left. Stupid BeOS"

Yes, there's supposed to be a sophisticated "Media kit" framework for pro audio and video work. But that too was mostly on the drawing board and not in the actual system they sold. The audio subsystem for example, while rather more powerful than AHI, pales in comparison to the offerings for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

Yes, their primitive codec system was hyped up as having features Linux would "never catch up to", but a few years later yellowTAB aren't using it. Instead they're using ports of Linux movie software.

Meanwhile, the REAL weaknesses (yes, those limitations above were trumpeted as the strong points) included abysmal network performance, poor quality drivers, and an almost complete lack of application software.

Bernd is a master of hype, if you watch the Zeta videos carefully and look at WHAT IS ON THE SCREEN rather than listening to his patter, you'll see that it's a long way from what he claims... there's a bit which Believers claim shows Bernd playing hundreds of MP3s simultaneously - but actually he has just created a playlist.
BeOS back on track : Comment 13 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 30-Sep-2003 06:42 GMT
In reply to Comment 10 (takemehomegrandma):
Distributions of existing BeOS system...

BeOS Personal Edition (PE) from Be Inc. last version 5.0x
BeOS Professional from Be Inc. last version 5.0x
BeOS Developer Edition - unauthorised derivative of BeOS PE
BeOS Max - unauthorised derivative of BeOS PE, last version 3.x
'Dano' - leaked Be Inc. Beta test code
'PhoS' - unauthorised derivative of Dano
Zeta from yellowTAB, yet to be released legal (?) derivative of BeOS

Clones include

OpenBeOS, MIT-licensed effort to clone kernel & userspace of BeOS
FreeBE, attempting to clone OpenBeOS kernel APIs on Linux
COSMOE, also using Linux, but not strictly a 1:1 clone of BeOS
BlueEyedOS, using Linux and X, have released a short "demo" CD

Their operating assumption, like all cargo cults, is that if they build something which resembles BeOS in certain aspects (APIs, hype, GUI) then all the things they _liked_ about BeOS will emerge spontaneously.
BeOS back on track : Comment 14 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by minator on 30-Sep-2003 08:41 GMT
In reply to Comment 12 (Anonymous):
>Yes, there's supposed to be a sophisticated "Media kit" framework for pro audio and video
>work. But that too was mostly on the drawing board and not in the actual system they sold.
>The audio subsystem for example, while rather more powerful than AHI, pales in comparison
>to the offerings for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

No, the Media kit was in BeOS and *shipping* (albeit full of bugs).
A new version was still in development which fixed many of the shortcomings but it was never released.

>Yes, their primitive codec system was hyped up as having features Linux would "never
>catch up to", but a few years later yellowTAB aren't using it. Instead they're using ports of
>Linux movie software.

They never had many codecs, thats why.
The DV codec was fine, I can play DV movies (4MB/Second) in BeOS far better than Windows can handle it (that said the sound didn't work...).

>Meanwhile, the REAL weaknesses (yes, those limitations above were trumpeted as the
>strong points) included abysmal network performance, poor quality drivers, and an
>almost complete lack of application software.

Networking was fixed in the unreleased DANO, BeOS originally used a microkernel but for networking performance it sucked badly, but once moved into the kernel speed became respectable (I was beta testing it).

There is plenty of software available and would have been a lot more if it wasn't for the focus shift.
Check:
www.bebits.com

For a long time I had to switch back to windows to do stuff but ironically just as Be went down there were enough applications around that meant I never had to do this.

>Bernd is a master of hype, if you watch the Zeta videos carefully and look at
>WHAT IS ON THE SCREEN rather than listening to his patter, you'll see that it's a long way
>from what he claims... there's a bit which Believers claim shows Bernd playing hundreds
>of MP3s simultaneously - but actually he has just created a playlist.

You could launch many MP3s and movie files simultaneously *years ago* on BeOS and the system remained stable and your MP3s didn't skip *ever* - something people still complain about on modern PCs with Linux.

BeOS was never perfect but that's the cost of having to support every chipset / peripheral out there. The best stuff they did was the late betas but they were never released, this is a system which while buggy (it was never tested properly) but has only crashed on me only once in 6 months and that was my desktop for 99% of the time.

Zeta is based on the original BeOS sources (From PalmSource) with a load of extra development and applications. I'll be ordering it shortly, and yes we hope to get it onto the Pegasos.
BeOS back on track : Comment 15 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by takemehomegrandma on 30-Sep-2003 08:55 GMT
In reply to Comment 12 (Anonymous):
> Yes, the Be filesystem can theoretically handle quite large files such as a
> full-length high quality movie...

IMO, the Be Filesystem was very interesting in MANY ways. Perhaps the most interesting one I have ever seen ...
BeOS back on track : Comment 16 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by takemehomegrandma on 30-Sep-2003 08:56 GMT
In reply to Comment 13 (Anonymous):
Thank you for that nice summary! :-)
BeOS back on track : Comment 17 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by BrianK on 30-Sep-2003 11:05 GMT
I'm missing something here... How does BeOS support or enhance the Amiga experience? Don't get me wrong it's news but Amiga News Network news? Is there a BeOS Amiga kernel or something I've missed?
BeOS back on track : Comment 18 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by whoopsy! on 30-Sep-2003 11:28 GMT
In reply to Comment 17 (BrianK):
I haven't used beos, it looks nice from screen.
BeOS back on track : Comment 19 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by beosfan on 30-Sep-2003 11:40 GMT
In reply to Comment 18 (whoopsy!):
Beos is very amiga-like. you should check it out.
BeOS back on track : Comment 20 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 30-Sep-2003 12:01 GMT
In reply to Comment 17 (BrianK):
ANN does not mean Amiga News Network, and MorphOS and PPC aren't amiga either.. so well, who cares?

BeOS might be nice, that's enough.
BeOS back on track : Comment 21 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by BrianK on 30-Sep-2003 12:31 GMT
In reply to Comment 20 (Hagge):
MorphOS not Amiga --- I mostly agree with you there. The people building it have Amiga knowledge and it seems to be conceived as an Amiga replacement or really good Amiga Emulation platform. So, I let that news slip through.

PPC not Amiga --- I disagree with you there with the AmigaOne being a PPC machine along with AmigaOS 4.0 designed for PPC, AmigaOne and the Cyberstorm PPC, cards PPC does have a place with an Amiga webiste.
BeOS back on track : Comment 22 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Monoxyde on 30-Sep-2003 12:57 GMT
In reply to Comment 19 (beosfan):
I sure liked what I saw. It's mature and (kind of) Amiga like. This'll definitely be my next choice *if* AOS4 for some strange and unforseen reason fails (or gets delayed indefinitely).
BeOS back on track : Comment 23 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by Tomas on 30-Sep-2003 15:07 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (Bill Hoggett):
They got a license from palm or whoever bought it from Be inc.
BeOS back on track : Comment 24 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by strobe on 01-Oct-2003 00:31 GMT
Port it to the PowerBook G4
BeOS back on track : Comment 25 of 25ANN.lu
Posted by mark on 02-Oct-2003 00:34 GMT
In reply to Comment 21 (BrianK):
@BrianK

By the same logic, the Pegasos is a PPC machine, along with MorphOS designed for PPC. You didn't actually explain the point you were trying to make that somehow one is "Amiga", and one isn't. Both OS4 and MorphOS are PPC Amiga replacements, with good Amiga emulation, being produced by 3rd parties. One just additionally has the rights to the trademarks. And the only way "official" Amigas can have PPC atm is via 3rd party unofficial add ons.

Remember that MorphOS runs on classic PPC Amigas, doesn't it? Plus it runs Amiga software, whilst BeOS does neither of these. Not that I have any great objection to seeing BeOS news, but I just never understand the "well since we cover MorphOS, we might as well talk about any old platform", when there is a clear line between MorphOS and BeOS/Windows/etc when it comes to being related to the Amiga.

There's a difference between "Amiga" as in the platform as a whole, and Amiga as in AmigaTM the official Amiga Inc Trademark. No one ever complained when Amiga Format ran articles about installing Linux and BSD on Amigas, did they?
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