Etc
BeOS - The un-dead OS
BeOS and it's quick demise should be known to any self-respecting geek, but to all others, it was an attempt to create an OS with focus on multimedia back in the end of '90ies. It was nice, it had sex appeal, it made never profit to anyone involved in it and was sold several times.
It's kind of dead since the beginning of this millennium, but it still pops up every now and then to mention that it's not dead yet and a little later some other smart guy will pop up and point out that in fact it's quite dead since a while.
Now, today on the metro ride to my work, an amusing story popped up during my daily mobile news reading routine in connection with "Zeta" and YellowTab/ magnussoft, which was selling the repackaged/ re-branded BeOS on German TV to desperate housewives, the unemployed and the elderly for EUR100 a pop, or so I have been told, as "Zeta". Since BeOS never brought any money to anyone involved, they were/ are filling for bankruptcy and were playing with the idea to opensource "Zeta".
So today's story goes, a Mr David "Lefty" Schlesinger of ACCESS Co., Ltd. said that "Zeta", and YellowTab/magnussoft for that matter, had no legal rights to distribute BeOS at any point, much less open source any part of it since they own the intellectual property to BeOS. But they won't sue since it's too complicated to sue in Germany and YellowTab/ magnussoft has no money to get from anyway...
Wait, is he saying YellowTab/ magnussoft were selling illegal copies of BeOS in the past few years? On the biggest private channel in Germany? To the desperate housewives, the unemployed and the elderly? Yes he is. I smell an interesting torrent of funny follow-ups on this topic. Stay tuned.
Via: Golem.de
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: BeOS - The un-dead OS.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://pugio.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/11
what i find at least as.. critical is: that guy claims Haiku (http://haiku-os.org/) is violating their right aswell.. even though he just says he is "sure that it represents the original work" (or something like that)
This is incorrect, I've never said any such thing. In fact, I've explicitly stated that a) Haiku is a valid open source project, b) I don't view it as being at all problematical, and c) I'll do what I can to support.
In fact, I recently cleared the release of several pieces of legacy BeOS documentation under Creative Commons deeds so the Haiku folks could distribute them without having to worry about infringing on the copyrights.
Hope this makes things clearer. I'm not sure where you got the idea that I made any statement to the effect that Haiku is also infringing on our intellectual property. If some specific posting gave you that notion, maybe you could post a pointer....
I agree with Lefty, from the Golem article one can already see that he has nothing against Haiku - however from the way the Golem article was written one could think the opposite when reading it quickly at work. (Most visitors to this came from that article, which got trackbacked by wordpress)