HP curently own BEOS

[ElPolloDiabl]

Hi,
Just wondering is there any chance HP would give access to BeOS?
Would some kind of petition make them release the source code, even at a certain price?
I'm quite happy with AROS, but it is a waste that BeOS will just be sitting there collecting dust, like Amiga did, during the Gateway years.

[klx300r]

ya they also STILL own the best mobile OS around and have done absolutely ZERO with it:madashell:

if history repeats itself BEOS=WebOS:(

[commodorejohn]

These days it's basically an impossibility that any large tech company would ever give up any of its rights to anything, even if it's never, ever going to do anything with it...

[Matt_H]

No point to pestering HP about BeOS now that there's Haiku: https://www.haiku-os.org/

[XDelusion]

There are so many things that I'd like to see freed up from the grip of Atari that will never see the light of day either. Tis sad.

[Matt_H]

Actually, do HP even have BeOS? I know Palm bought Be, but did BeOS end up with Palm's software division? The software division was spun off and acquired by another company long before HP bought Palm.

[haywirepc]

I never got beos and I don't really get haiku. Its a brilliantly designed multi tasking multimedia os. The underlying architecture is awesome. It is incredible effecient and beautiful underneath... But its the top layer that always got me.
 It works incredibly well but the user interface is so horribly ugly and disgustingly bad for the eyes.  

They need to make it skinnable or something, because out of the box all you can change is the wallpaper but the window borders and rest of it is just disgusting.

Yes I care about function, but the user interface needs to be somewhat elegant because you don't see whats under the hood, you see the car. Somehow,  they always forgot that or ignored that.

BEOS failed because it worked great but looked like ****, regardless of what anyone else said. EVERYONE tried personal edition beos back in the day, but it was so ugly and uncustomizable no one except real nerds who really really care about what is under the hood could stand using it.

If you took the same underlying internals and made a pretty amiga like graphical ui on top I think it would have been a huge success. Eye candy does matter... No really, it does.

If someone takes haiku and makes everything the user sees be able to be changed to suit the users tastes... like linux, then it would have a real shot at getting some users. Until then its a great kernel with a really ****ty and ugly gui. But thats just my view.

[fishy_fiz]

BeOS, and inheritantly Haiku is very skinnable/customisable. In its day it was pretty much industry leading in this regard. OS4 pretty clearly borrowed from BeOS with its enhanced (vs. OS3.x) window shapes, and even skins (some are nigh on identical).

[TheBilgeRat]

I never got beos and I don't really get haiku. Its a brilliantly designed multi tasking multimedia os. The underlying architecture is awesome. It is incredible effecient and beautiful underneath... But its the top layer that always got me.
 It works incredibly well but the user interface is so horribly ugly and disgustingly bad for the eyes.  

They need to make it skinnable or something, because out of the box all you can change is the wallpaper but the window borders and rest of it is just disgusting.

Yes I care about function, but the user interface needs to be somewhat elegant because you don't see whats under the hood, you see the car. Somehow,  they always forgot that or ignored that.

BEOS failed because it worked great but looked like ****, regardless of what anyone else said. EVERYONE tried personal edition beos back in the day, but it was so ugly and uncustomizable no one except real nerds who really really care about what is under the hood could stand using it.

If you took the same underlying internals and made a pretty amiga like graphical ui on top I think it would have been a huge success. Eye candy does matter... No really, it does.

If someone takes haiku and makes everything the user sees be able to be changed to suit the users tastes... like linux, then it would have a real shot at getting some users. Until then its a great kernel with a really ****ty and ugly gui. But thats just my view.

I remember when I got rid of my A1200 I "upgraded" to a Power Computing Power Mac clone (240Mhz?) that included a copy of BeOS.  I tried it for a day or three before going back to OS 8.1.  I wasn't really interested in an OS that had no apps I wanted to run and compared to 8.1 looked just as you described.