It would be evil if they had intended to fail. I assume they intended to succeed. It turned out that Linux won the server market, but it was entirely plausible

It would be evil if they had intended to fail. I assume they intended to succeed. It turned out that Linux won the server market, but it was entirely plausible that BeOS could have won instead. At the time, lots of well-funded startups used Solaris/SPARC web servers, and many used NT, so it wasn't a foregone conclusion that open source would win. BeOS had a lot to recommend it over Solaris, not to mention NT.