Ironically, that's kinda what happened to BeOS--the assets were bought by Palm, right around the time Palm was splitting into two companies. PalmSource, the OS

Ironically, that's kinda what happened to BeOS--the assets were bought by Palm, right around the time Palm was splitting into two companies. PalmSource, the OS company, developed "Palm OS Cobalt," which was intended to be the next-generation Palm operating system, built on BeOS. While they completed Cobalt, the now-separate Palm hardware company didn't use it. Also, according to Jean-Louis Gassée, an Apple engineer tried to buy BeOS from Palm for the then-unnamed smartphone project, as a third candidate between Fadell's vision of a souped-up Pixo--the iPod OS--and Forstall's vision of a cut-down OS X. Palm turned the engineer down. (Gassée didn't name the engineer, but it's hard not to suspect it was Dominic Giampaolo, who created BeFS and went on to create Apple's Spotlight and then, unsurprisingly, work on APFS.)