Update on the ZETA / ACCESS Drama
Stephen B. - April 9th, 2007
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Archive for 2007 As the saga regarding ZETA’s legality continues, several new pieces of information have surfaced. In the comments for the OSNews “ZETA Timeline,” David Scheslinger has posted a response to some of the questions raised in the timeline article. Schlesinger’s response helps to clear up a few obvious questions – including why ACCESS chose the BitsOfNews.com comments section to make their first public statement on the matter. In addition to the timeline published by OSNews, Haiku developer Marcus Overhagen has written his own summary of the current situation and the events which led to it. Aside from providing a handy overview to those who haven’t followed recent events closely, it also contains English translations of several BerndsWorld.com posts that had previously only been available in German. And finally, there appears to have been some recent public discussion between Schlesinger and Korz. Schlesinger does mention an unsuccessful attempt to make a comment to Korz’s blog (and suggests that the comment was deliberately removed), but the post he mentioned was later visible on BerndsWorld.com. The site appears to be offline at the moment, however, and it’s currenty unknown if the outage is due to technical or legal reasons (the server itself appears to be online, but the page presently displays 403 permission errors).
There have several new developments in the wake of recent comments made by David “Lefty†Schlesinger of ACCESS Ltd.; he recently stated that Bernd Korz never had a legal right to distribute a BeOS derivative. Shortly following Mr. Schlesinger’s comments, Bernd Korz posted a brief response on his blog. The post contains little information beyond mentioning that Bernd is scheduled to consult a lawyer, but he does at least promise some clarification once the discussion has taken place. Schlesinger’s original comments were, in turn, a response to the announcement that Bernd was considering an open source release of some portions of ZETA. The situation has also prompted a response from MagnusSoft – who had still been distributing ZETA following the recent end of their business involvement with Bernd. But due to the statements made by Schlesinger, it was announced today that MagnusSoft will no longer distribute ZETA (1.21 or 1.5) – at least until the legal uncertainties have been resolved. And lastly, OSNews has posted a timeline summarizing the history of ZETA and ZETA development. While a few things are left out (there seems to be no mention of “BeOS NG,” the original product announced by yellowTAB), it does still provide a good overview of the past few years. Update: As 0033 mentions in the comments, there is some good news as well: Vasper from BeOS Max has written on his blog that he has been in contact with David Schlesinger from ACCESS. According to the post, they do not see a reason to interfere with BeOS Max development.
Shortly following the announcement that Bernd Korz was calling a halt to ZETA development, there has been some new information from ACCESS Ltd. regarding ZETA’s legality. BitsOfNews.com has posted an interview with David “Lefty” Schlesinger, Director of Open Source Technologies at ACCESS, prompted by a recent comment he made regarding ZETA. From the interview:
The question of ZETA’s legality has been around for quite a while – Palm purchased Be Inc.’s intellectual property assets in 2001 and the development of (what became) ZETA was announced shortly afterward, but this is the first definitive answer we’ve seen from either side. There’s also some good news in the interview: Schlesinger mentions that he believes “Haiku _does_ represent original work.” In addition to the recent disussions between ACCESS and Haiku developers, it appears that the Haiku Project is not in any legal dangers related to BeOS copyrights.
According to this post on the Haiku website ACCESS has given Haiku the permission to release both the BeBook and the archived Be newsletters (which include lot’s of sample code) to the public. ACCESS is the company that took over all the source code and intellectual property of Be inc. from PalmSource. After a request by the side of Haiku, David Schlesinger from ACCESS responded that his company is very pleased to be able to support the Haiku project by making these documents more widely available to interested developers. Both the BeBook and the newsletters are at this moment available for anyone on various sites, but it’s a good thing that Haiku will be officially able to use and spread this documentation. Especially the newsletters have lot’s of good articles written by Be dev’s on software development, together with sample code. With the recent contact between Haiku and ACCESS, who knows there might be more parts of the Be heritage that ACCESS will make available in the future…
You will probably already have heard of the following by now, but here we go. A little over a week ago the news got out that the the Zeta team and their distributor and main funder Magnussoft were parting ways, but today it seems that the recent difficulties have brought Zeta to a hold. The main developer and force behind Zeta, Bernd Thorsten Korz announced on his blog that for him the Zeta adventure is over and he quits developing Zeta. Basically this means that as of today Zeta is no longer in development and the only commercial attempt to revive BeOS is over. In the post on his blog Bernd states that at this point he cannot go into much of the details, it is uncertain if the planned update for Zeta 1.5 will ever go public. Bernd also writes that he is talking to his legal adviser to see how much, if any, of the code produced by the Zeta team he will be able to donate to the community. Finally he says that none of this code can be accessed either by Magnussoft or yellowTab, and he intends to keep it that way and won’t give it away without the approval of the other developers. Truly a sad day in the history of BeOS, I cannot emphasize enough on how important it is to have at least some sort of commercial motor behind this system. With Zeta gone Haiku is the last actively developed version of BeOS, and when the first version comes out it will be at the level of BeOS R5, released over seven(!) years ago. Let’s not draw conclusions to quickly but the downfall of Zeta will decrease the even to small BeOS community and the system is no longer a (possible) alternative for day to day use, at least not until Haiku R2. Although the Zeta team has always been a little bit troublesome with their pr and they never really manged to resolve the discussions around their access to sources Zeta also did a lot of good work. They made it possible to run Zeta on lot’s of modern hardware, and a couple of really nice applications were created. Besides that they promised the continuation of the platform. Let’s hope that all of the work done on Zeta in the last years will not be lost at once, and sources will stay in the community. From here I would like to take the liberty to thank Bernd and his team for all the hard work and good care over the years. I did a very rough translation of Bernds post, click below to read it. Read More »
With Haiku getting closer and closer to an R1 release I think it is time for little review on the achievements of the development team in the last months. Haiku is being covered on various websites and blogs lately especially after attending SCaLE and the already famous tech talk at Google. But although it might seem that Haiku is only weeks away from the so important first release there is still a lot of work that has to be done, networking being the biggest. But more on that later. Read More »
A couple of weeks ago Haiku attended the fifth annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE). During the expo Oscar from todoexito.com had an interview with Bruno and Axel from the development team. In the interview Bruno and Axel talk about the history and objectives of Haiku, the current status and their personal part in the project. Although the interview is short, and the questions are not very in-depth, it’s good to Haiku getting exposure. Now that they actually have something to show it’s time to start attracting some attention! Get the mp3 of the interview here, the photo’s from SCaLE are also still online here
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