Awesome! Ever since I saw BeOS for the first time, I knew this was going to be the OS to replace AmigaOS for me. It even had a lot of Amiga-like features that I liked -- things like Classes (Translators I think BeOS calls them), a small, fast, light, responsive GUI, a shell integrated into the OS from day one, so it belongs there (unfortunately it's Unix -- which means -- case sensitivity and innane command names, but I suppose it also inherits quite a lot of power from that base as well), and a focus on multimedia. In fact I think BeOS beats AmigaOS in a lot of ways as well, obviously, in all ways that have to do with "keeping up" (dealing with large harddrives, memory protection, understanding (some) modern multimedia file types and so on). I remember they even had a floppy demo as well at one point, for the Intel version, it could boot, get to the GUI, and run both a web server and simple web browser from there! That puts it right on par with the Amiga in terms of space efficiency (or perhaps ahead -- can you fit the AmigaOS ROM, (possibly stripped down) Workbench disk, a simple web browser (say Voyager) and a web server and a TCP/IP stack in 1.4megs? Not sure, anyone know?)
The more I see this the more I feel this is the way to go, with both Amiga and BeOS, I mean, open source projects. There are a lot of BeOS themed open source projects (Blue Eyed OS, OpenBeOS, BeFree) and some components of the original BeOS were open sourced (Tracker and Desktop I think) plus of course it was built with the most common open source development toolchain (gcc and friends). I think it will survive and flourish, with or without Be and whether or not Palm wants to be helpful. Similiarily, AROS. I took a look at this thing just last night! Wow! It boots and runs on my machine, and is very fast. It looks Amiga-y and they've recompiled some older Amiga software which runs now just from a recompile. Of course it runs very fast! And they have some new demos showing off their scheduler, which looks very good, don't know how to compare it with the old one though since you can't do a fair comparison -- since the new scheduler in AROS will not run (yet) on old Amiga hardware nor will the AmigaOS 3.x scheduler run on an Intel, so can't compare. Even so, they've designed AROS with a hardware abstraction layer and are being careful about architechture portability, so that it should eventually port to PPC, 68K. I'm looking into perhaps helping but not sure where to start, I need to get it building first I suppose, and am of course very tempted to move in the BeOS direction anyway.
Erik