4 ms·

While it's been ~18 years, this doesn't at all sound correct to me. BeOS was a commercial product from its very beginning. There were free "developer release" v

While it's been ~18 years, this doesn't at all sound correct to me. BeOS was a commercial product from its very beginning. There were free "developer release" versions, but it was sold as boxed software from R3 on. The last official release, BeOS R5, had a free version called "BeOS Personal Edition," which ran as an app inside Windows or Linux, but the full version of R5 was still commercial, at $69.95 (with an upgrade discount). I don't recall any licensing requirements pinned to the amount of RAM you had. A large part of what did in BeOS was a combination of Microsoft's OEM licensing requirements and Be's steadfast belief that the only path to success was pre-installation on a major PC brand. IIRC, if you offered Windows pre-installations at all, you had to pay for every machine that Windows could be installed on whether or not it was actually installed, and you couldn't offer machines capable of dual-booting. Be concentrated their efforts on BeIA, an "internet appliance" version of the OS, which was dead in the water -- according to a lawsuit Be filed against Microsoft, MS pressured their OEMs not to partner with Be on both BeOS and BeIA. (Microsoft settled the suit for around $24M, IIRC.) Personally, I think BeOS might have been able to survive as a niche OS if Be had kept their focus solely on it, kept the price competitive with boxed Linux distributions (those were a thing back then), and not been dedicated to the "go big or go home" mantra, but I don't have any inside info to prove (or disprove) that.

allenbrunson 9y ago
I was one of the people who worked at Be, right up to the very end, when the company went out of business, got absorbed into Palm, and I was laid off. I remember all this the same way you do. ... Except that I don't think there is anything they could have done that would have made them successful, at that point in time, other than possibly not playing hardball when Apple came calling. Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry was just too great.
- qubex 9y ago
  I just wanted to let you know that to this very day I mourn the loss of Be Inc and BeOS. Whatever work you did there I’d like you to know (that for me at least) it was worth it because it left an enduring impression on those of us that had the privilege to use the system.
  - allenbrunson 9y ago
    Unfortunately, I didn't do much to move BeOS further down the field. By the time I got there, the company had given up on BeOS as a standalone consumer product and was squarely focused on BeIA, specifically the Sony eVilla. (you can google it for the whole sad, sordid tale, if you dare.) My contribution to the ecosystem, if in fact I ever made one, was to write what I thought of as the best USENET newsreader available on the platform. http://www.platinumball.net/pineapple/news/beos/ http://www.platinumball.net/pineapple/news/beos/ I definitely would still be using BeOS today, as my day-to-day OS, if that were remotely possible, in this day and age.
    - qubex 9y ago
      I remember using that. I think I even registered.
mmjaa 9y ago
I'm a huge BeOS fan (my BeBox still works) and in my opinion the one thing that Be, Inc. could have done to stay alive, and the only thing, is this: focus on making innovative hardware. They didn't - the decided that hardware is too hard, and JLG lost the momentum - but if they'd made a BeBox that people actually wanted, they would definitely have survived in my opinion. A Laptop-format BeBox, for example, would have had an opportunity to really dominate the field video world, in those days. But, its all history now.
- qubex 9y ago
  I also have a working BeBox (dual 133 MHz 603e, 32 MB RAM), but I’m a bit concerned about the IDE drive (640MB). The CD-ROM drive doesn’t work very reliably anymore either, unfortunately. I even have some peripherals I soldered together for the GeekPort way back in 1997-1999. Beautiful machine. Wonderful operating system. Pity they were so inept commercially. That said, I was also a NeXT user, and I’m convinced that Apple wouldn’t have returned to the forefront if they had chosen “Plan Be” instead of the Steve Jobs option.
morganvachon 9y ago
> "BeOS R5, had a free version called "BeOS Personal Edition," which ran as an app inside Windows or Linux" Not quite. While the file system resided on the Windows or Linux partition as a drive image, to run BeOS you rebooted the computer into BeOS natively; the boot loader booted that drive image from the other OS's file system. In fact, once in the BeOS environment, you could use the BeOS disk manager and installer to create a BeOS native partition on free space on the main drive or a second drive, and install the OS natively to the PC. Effectively, you could run the full OS on its own for free. That's exactly what I did for the first few months I used BeOS back in 2000; I was so taken with the OS I bought the full version and tracked down a hard copy of the BeOS Bible and Be Advanced Topics, both of which are still on my bookshelf. > "I don't recall any licensing requirements pinned to the amount of RAM you had." There were no licensing restrictions that I was aware of, however it wouldn't run on machines with more than 768MB without a patch.

allenbrunson 9y ago

I was one of the people who worked at Be, right up to the very end, when the company went out of business, got absorbed into Palm, and I was laid off. I remember all this the same way you do. ... Except that I don't think there is anything they could have done that would have made them successful, at that point in time, other than possibly not playing hardball when Apple came calling. Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry was just too great.

qubex 9y ago
I just wanted to let you know that to this very day I mourn the loss of Be Inc and BeOS. Whatever work you did there I’d like you to know (that for me at least) it was worth it because it left an enduring impression on those of us that had the privilege to use the system.
- allenbrunson 9y ago
  Unfortunately, I didn't do much to move BeOS further down the field. By the time I got there, the company had given up on BeOS as a standalone consumer product and was squarely focused on BeIA, specifically the Sony eVilla. (you can google it for the whole sad, sordid tale, if you dare.) My contribution to the ecosystem, if in fact I ever made one, was to write what I thought of as the best USENET newsreader available on the platform. http://www.platinumball.net/pineapple/news/beos/ http://www.platinumball.net/pineapple/news/beos/ I definitely would still be using BeOS today, as my day-to-day OS, if that were remotely possible, in this day and age.
  - qubex 9y ago
    I remember using that. I think I even registered.

mmjaa 9y ago

I'm a huge BeOS fan (my BeBox still works) and in my opinion the one thing that Be, Inc. could have done to stay alive, and the only thing, is this: focus on making innovative hardware. They didn't - the decided that hardware is too hard, and JLG lost the momentum - but if they'd made a BeBox that people actually wanted, they would definitely have survived in my opinion. A Laptop-format BeBox, for example, would have had an opportunity to really dominate the field video world, in those days. But, its all history now.

qubex 9y ago
I also have a working BeBox (dual 133 MHz 603e, 32 MB RAM), but I’m a bit concerned about the IDE drive (640MB). The CD-ROM drive doesn’t work very reliably anymore either, unfortunately. I even have some peripherals I soldered together for the GeekPort way back in 1997-1999. Beautiful machine. Wonderful operating system. Pity they were so inept commercially. That said, I was also a NeXT user, and I’m convinced that Apple wouldn’t have returned to the forefront if they had chosen “Plan Be” instead of the Steve Jobs option.

morganvachon 9y ago

> "BeOS R5, had a free version called "BeOS Personal Edition," which ran as an app inside Windows or Linux" Not quite. While the file system resided on the Windows or Linux partition as a drive image, to run BeOS you rebooted the computer into BeOS natively; the boot loader booted that drive image from the other OS's file system. In fact, once in the BeOS environment, you could use the BeOS disk manager and installer to create a BeOS native partition on free space on the main drive or a second drive, and install the OS natively to the PC. Effectively, you could run the full OS on its own for free. That's exactly what I did for the first few months I used BeOS back in 2000; I was so taken with the OS I bought the full version and tracked down a hard copy of the BeOS Bible and Be Advanced Topics, both of which are still on my bookshelf. > "I don't recall any licensing requirements pinned to the amount of RAM you had." There were no licensing restrictions that I was aware of, however it wouldn't run on machines with more than 768MB without a patch.