9 Dec
2007
9 Dec
'07
2:24 p.m.
In article <006701c83aa7$5f230860$c600a8c0 at
game>,
"Teo Zenios" <teoz at neo.rr.com> writes:
At the time of the deal with Jobs, sure. When I adopted it at BeOS Pro R5
(2000), no, it was a finished OS. The downfall was with Gassee and his
boneheaded drivers philosophy (or strategy if you want to call it that).
Rather than continuing to write drivers to support products, (and this is
verbatim what I was explained by tech support there at the time) they
wanted to force the hardware manufacturers to support them and take them
seriously for driver support. I.e., enough users contact the hardware
manufacturers wanting a driver and they in turn will decide to support
BeOS and write the driver for it.
Of course that didn't work, the drivers never appeared, users had to stick
with older hardware or loose BeOS support, and BeOS sold to PALM.
On the plus side, there's Haiku. An open source version of BeOS R5,
that's compatible in both source and binary. I've actually replaced some
parts of my Pro R5 with it, and they've worked flawlessly. I believe they
just need to complete the network and usb stacks to have a full
replacement (last I checked).
Marty
NEXTstep was a finished OS that just needed
ported, BEOS was a work in
progress that needed more work (networking etc). It came down to Gassee
wanting too much cash and Jobs being a better bullshitter.
A fair enough assessment, but the main point I wanted to make is that
it wasn't just Unix and Windows that passed on the ideas in BeOS. It
was everyone.