Remembering The Little Guys

Back in the late 90s, there was a lot of wild and crazy operating system development projects. Linux was growing in it's early days, Windows was in it's hay-day, and Apple was floundering, but would shortly gain a bunch of strength once again with the return of Steve Jobs and the development of OS X.

But there was much more out there than what we know of as the Big Three in the IT industry... Unix was still quite common, BSD was commonly used, NextSTEP was in development, and so many others were out there.

There was a little guy out there though, one that was distributed for free yet still had closed source: BeOS.

Be was the little guy on the block. Having dealt with being only for AT&T Hobbit architecture, and later PowerPC only, before adding in x68 in the late 90s, which was when I first started using it.

The OS seemed as easy, if not easier than using KDE and GNOME in Mandrake Linux back then, so I was tinkering with it. The system was stable and there seemed to be just about everything I wanted on the system pre-installed. I was continuing to work with the software, but due to school requirements, I couldn't keep running BeOS running, especially since I didn't understand the concept of "dual booting" at that time and was unable to figure out how to do things in open source that would be compatible with my Microsoft-centric high school.

In the end, I only worked with Be for a few weeks before I headed back to Windows 98, an operating system that paled in comparison to BeOS.

There are some out there that may question me, "Well, if it was so nice, where is it now?" Unfortunately, due to their failing business model, BeOS didn't make it much past 2001. Be Incorporated folded, selling shares off for just a few dimes.

Controversy was followed, albeit a few years later. Be's source code somehow got to yellowTAG, a German company, which began re-releasing BeOS under the new name, ZETA in 2004. Zeta looked interesting to me, especially since I was nursing along my Windows 2000 machines, and I was none-too-interested in switching to Windows XP and the prospective Longhorn (later Windows Vista) seemed even worse. In that situation, I was getting more and more disillusioned with the Microsoft model of development and their ever-growing paranoid obsession with software piracy.

I never switched to Zetta, because of their custom license agreement and their closed source model... In the end, I chose openSuSE Linux.

Now, I'm pretty grateful. Zeta was only for for a few years before it was found to be legally questionable to such a degree that yellowTAB (now bankrupt) stopped all software development and distribution.

I must say, when I found out about this, I was really disappointed. When Be folded, I was really hoping that the OS would go open source, and be distributed and modified by the community, since the business had failed. When I heard about ZETA, I believed that they were close to the appropriate solution, however not being open source, I was a little disappointed, but I could understand the mentality. But to once again go through seeing Be and later ZETA go through these failures is very disappointed. There was so much potential for these operating systems... It's sad to see that business-related troubles has once again stopped development cold of a quality operating system.