ZETA Legality Questioned by ACCESS
Stephen B. - April 4th, 2007
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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.
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.
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
A new editor / poster has joined BeOSNews today: please give a big welcome to Mr. 0033, of Studio-33 fame. We had discussed teaming up for a while now – and with the new version of the site launched, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so. Studio-33 has consistently been one of the best sources for BeOS-related news and I’m delighted to have 0033 aboard!
Last Friday Stephen reported here that Magnussoft and the Zeta development team are parting, news that got out after a blog post by Bernd Korz, the Zeta team lead. Following the discussion this caused on the various websites and forums Magnussoft made an official statement in which they clarify the relation between them and Zeta at least a little bit. After the demise of yellowTab last year Magnussoft started funding the Zeta team to ensure it’s continuation. At the same time they started working on games for the Zeta platform and later they adopted the Wonderbrush application. Because the sales figures of Zeta are not what they had expected them to be Magnussoft is no longer able to keep funding the development team. Apart from being the main investor in Zeta, Magnussoft was also the exclusive distributer, which they will remain at least until the end of 2007. Magnussoft states that they are still interested in the Zeta platform, and they intend to keep developing and distributing the software titles they carry for the platform. Also, they are looking for other investors. Looking at the troublesome and short history of Zeta investors probably don’t queue in line to take over the funding of the team, and although I hope not this might mean that the Zeta project is coming to an end. I don’t know the exact number of people that are currently working for Bernd, and I’m sure that they are very committed, but they won’t work without being payed, neither would I. Read the statement from Magnussoft on zeta-os. Something totally different now, as you might have noticed I’m new here! Some people will know me from Studio-33, or from BeShare. After a lot of begging, Stephen allowed me to post here, so together with a new design there is also a new editor. You can reach me by email, or comment on my posts if there is anything you want to let me know. I hope everyone will enjoy the things I write here and if you don’t you know where to find me…
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