BeOS was great; I should go look and see how Haiku is doing.
An old post of mine from Kuro5hin.Org, dated “Fri Apr 20th, 2001 at 05:15:55 PM EST”.
This is a letter which I’m emailing to the founder and CEO of Be, Inc.. As you may be aware, Be’s recently publicized financial problems and their recent registration of the openbeos.* domain names have raised speculation about possible plans to bring the Operating System into the Open Source world (fueled particularly by several articles at The Register). Be’s J.L. Gassee responded to those speculation in a recent interview with The Merc, stating that “If I felt it was a way to make my shareholders happy I would do it in a heartbeat”. In this letter I hope to convince him that there is a way to open BeOS and still benefit his shareholders and employees.
Jean-Louis,
As a committed user of and developer for BeOS, I’ve been following the coverage on The Register and now in The Merc of hints that you folks might be willing to open the source to BeOS. As a daily user, I would naturally see such a move as massively helpful, since it’d let me fix the USB mouse driver to support my Kensington trackball much more easily. 😉
I can, however, understand that you have obligations not only to your shareholders, but also to your employees, to only do what is financially prudent for Be as a company. With that in mind, I do think there is a path to openning the source which you may not have considered which would help Be financially while helping those of us out in userland to keep BeOS a viable choice.
I propose that you sell the operating system to a consumer cooperative composed of the BeOS’s users and developers, who would then have acccess to the source to continue development. This would open the source to people who can help develop it without actually making the system “free”, which may offend the more extreme advocates of Open Source, but which would allow you to fulfill your obligations to your shareholders and employees without letting the OS die. As a pseudo-commercial venture, in that it would of necessity charge membership fees, this cooperative would have the added advantage of being able to actually pay developers for their contributions to the OS.
If such an enterprise were set up, it would be reasonable to set an annual membership fee of, say, $50 with a first-year fee of $100. If the co-op were to purchase the OS from Be with an arrangement by which 50% of the membership fees were to be paid to Be until a pre-decided price were met, you would have met all your obligations to your shareholders while still keeping this great OS moving forward (and you would still be able to use this OS as a basis for BeIA).
As the OS is currently languishing, this strategy can’t actually hurt Be as a company and, by re-activating development on the core OS, it should give an extra boost to your IA strategy.
Please, give this option some serious consideration. As you are French, I trust that you won’t have the Americans’ instinctive knee-jerk rejection of any proposal for collective action. There are many of us out here who would be seriously distraught if the OS (or Be itself) were to disappear, not to mention the massive committment of time that we would have lost to developing software for BeOS.
Thank you,
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