BeOS was amazing. It simply smoked the competition. It was sleek, functional, good-looking, fun to program for, and had blistering speed (remember it playing 6

BeOS was amazing. It simply smoked the competition. It was sleek, functional, good-looking, fun to program for, and had blistering speed (remember it playing 6 different videos each on a side of a rotating cube?). It was not free software, but with features like that, who cared, right? Well, its community cared when BeOS was mutated into an "appliance OS" and then later sold off and closed down. I'm not optimistic about Haiku. As soon as it becomes popular (and I don't see why it wouldn't -- it's aimed squarely at knocking the socks off of end-users), I bet all the core devs get scooped up by some company which will then add proprietary lock-in features and sell it to users.