Like most companies of that era, they built their own hardware (BeBox) which was very expensive (compared to the PCs of the time). Later they moved to Apple ha

Like most companies of that era, they built their own hardware (BeBox) which was very expensive (compared to the PCs of the time). Later they moved to Apple hardware and Apple did try to buy them but they held out for more money. Linux took hold because you could pull any old PC out of the junk pile and load it up and go. BSD, at the time, was fracturing into multiple versions and having legal troubles. Haiku alpha 4 is awesome. But there are too many other projects out there so there aren't enough resources to make faster progress. The wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS has a lot of more good information.