[rvnx]

Beautiful to see such passion and great execution, especially for 20 years in a row.

It's like a piece of art.

I suspect the company that created BeOS actually lost the source-code and that's potentially the real reason they don't want to share, because from an economic perspective there does not seem anything of value there.

[chucky]

I think it's more likely the original BeOS source code contains proprietary code licensed from third-parties, which means someone would have to spend significant effort on figuring out what can and cannot be released.

[tialaramex]

Much worse, it's likely the BeOS code includes a bunch of unlicensed stuff. Be had been caught more than once "accidentally" including GPL'd code in their proprietary OS back when they existed. I doubt it's just GPL code that "accidentally" gets copy pasted into a codebase like that. If somebody has the code (e.g. from a previous job) it's getting pasted in "Just temporarily" and never being removed because there are always higher priorities.

[memsom]

This^^^^

(though to be honest, Android has a lot of BeOS concepts in it because the same engineers ended up working on it too. It has Binder, and Intents are basically BMessages - there are all the Loopers, Handlers and Receivers too...)

[squarefoot]

Just another proof that copyright laws must be heavily reformed asap because they continue to harm development also in cases where any reason of protecting some company's IP is long gone.

[bruce511]

Is it though? I think there's scope to improve the laws around intellectual property, but I feel like it's a stretch to suggest that the lack of BeOS source code "harms development".

[rvense]

An open source desktop OS that was basically usable for day-to-day stuff and easy to install, released in 2001? I don't think it's hyperbole to say that that would have changed the course of computer history.

[klyrs]

Were you there at the time? Because I was a big computer nerd at the time, huffing all the OS/OS fumes I could get my grubby little hands on. Windows 3 had already won the game -- and that was when non-computer-nerds were asking their computer-nerd friends for advice and getting PCs hand-built by the same. When win95 came out, the non-computer-nerds forgot that the command line existed. When win98 came out, even computer-nerds were losing interest in the command line. Win2k was (imho) the best windows operating system ever released. It was extremely stable and usable, supported everything but apple software and a few bits and bobs that nobody but us nerds cared about, and it took serious effort to buy a computer that didn't have it installed by default.

So a year after win2k is released, your selling points are "basically usable" ( vs "highly compatible"), "free/[nerd-shibboleth]" (vs "hidden in the cost of a computer"), and "easy to install" (vs "already installed"). I think it's hyperbole to suggest that BeOS being open source would have dramatically changed the course of computer history. If anything, I think it's worth considering what would have happened to the already-paltry Linux Desktop experience if BeOS absorbed developer attention.

[mook]

While I agree that Win2k was good, I don't think it was quite that popular; The computers you could normally get were still Win98/Me until WinXP. The only way you'd have gotten Win2k pre-installed was either getting a workstation-class machine or unlicensed machines.

[rvense]

I was kind of there. I ran BeOS for a while for fun some years after it had died, in between moving from Macs (which I grew up on in the 90's) to BSD and then Linux.

My point was basically what you're saying: BeOS was not nearly where Windows was, but it was miles and miles ahead of Linux, and it provided a unified graphical OS instead of the fragmented Linux base with all its duplicated efforts. Now, it's hard to say whether we the cascade of attention-deficit teenagers would have united behind an MIT/GPL BeOS and succeeded in producing something actually usable by people who were interested in doing more with their computers than setting up Conky and Fluxbox to post screenshots online, but I think the landscape might have looked different if it'd been an option. BeOS when I used it in 2005 or so was already curiosity, an antique, but if you take all the people who were working on Haiku (which started as OpenBeOS around the end of Be, Inc.), and throw in a handful of the people who were working on KDE and XFCE, starting from everything BeOS could do in 2001, instead of Linux and raw X, what do you have in 2005-6 when Ubuntu started picking up steam?

[pjmlp]

As someone that has the CD-ROM they shipped on magazines as advertising, it was mostly usable, for single users.

And after they lost to NeXT, regarding being acquired, not much else happened in regards to OS development.

[squarefoot]

"Promising OS dies after assets are acquired and put in a closet" is still one of the best arguments in favor of Open Source.

[kryptiskt]

Palm bought BeOS back in the day, but they didn't do anything with it. It was spun out with the PalmOS into Palmsource when Palm went to other OSes, so it didn't follow the rest of Palm into HP (and then LG). Palmsource was then swallowed by a Japanese company called Access, which was and apparently still is making a browser for embedded applications called Netfront.

[rbanffy]

Early Toshiba smart TVs used Access software. Wasn’t pleasant to develop for.

[sillywalk]

Palmsource did open-source Binder, which is still around, and widely used.

[tadfisher]

Thanks for that history. I was under the impression it was an Android, Inc. invention, but that it came from BeOS is blowing my mind.

[memsom]

Nope. Dianne Hackbourne was a key Be developer.

You also have most of the Intent system, the Receivers and Handlers as well as a lot of the general Android API to thank Be Inc for. When you look at the Be API, you can find analogues to most of the Android API, and once you realise that a bunch of the key developers were ex-Be Inc refugees it becomes a lot harder to see what is independent development, what was influenced by and what is a straight up clone of the Be API.

[memsom]

> I suspect the company that created BeOS actually lost the source-code and that's potentially the real reason they don't want to share

Nope. The source code exists. You can find rather corrupted chunks of it archived on a very famous archiving site. The other posters are correct - it belongs to someone and they don't want to release it because it contains a lot of proprietary code and cleaning it up to make it releasable would neuter it in a way that makes it pointless. That and the ~24 years where nothing was done to it making is way past useful even to Haiku.