(rant) BeOS->Dan0->YellowTab->Magnussoft->?

Weird headline, but there's a point. For those who don't keep up with the greatest OS in history, Beos, here's the 30 second version of it's history.

<backgroundOnBeOS>

Be Inc created the Bebox with it's custom designed operating system BeOS. This was generally considered to be an awesome machine but thanks to bad marketing/managment it failed. After that Be focused on a x86 port which was powerful, elegant and no one got it. It did things, UI-wise, that systems of today finally are getting, things like rendering video on OpenGL surfaces and so on. Lot of the things were just for showing off but it's still a powerful os.
Be Inc saw that BeOS wasn't very profitable so they switched their focus on to their internet appliance software, BeIA. Sadly this was way ahead of it's time at a time when most internet access was dial-up so that sold about as well as icecream on the north pole. Be Inc went bankrupt shortly after and sold the rights to BeOS to Palm.

Now here is where it gets hard to keep track of. Some say that Bernd Korz has bought the source and/or rights to distribute it but there's been no evidence provided for or against that. He founded YellowTab anyway and went on to develop and sell Zeta (presumably BeOS 5.1 or 6).

Last year the company went bankrupt and a deal was made with magnussoft to sell and distribute Zeta as well as port software to it. The development team at Yellowtab stayed on to keep working on Zeta and a patch was recently released, bring some pretty sought after new features such as multi-user and a translation framework.

A couple of days ago magnussoft and Zeta parted ways for undisclosed reasons and now it's in a state of limbo.

</backgroundOnBeOS>

That should provide some background atleast to my post. I'm a huge BeOS fan and have been using it on and off for that past 10 years and I still think it's an amazingly powerful os with a strong foundation. It's got some very good design choices that I think are relevant even today.

I'm just curious if anyone else here is a fan and how they think Zeta should be handled in the future. Assuming Bernd owns the source should it be donated to Haiku, opened up in any other way or should it be kept closed source with further development?

If I had the finances for it I'd buy YellowTab and their devs in a heart-beat, what do you think?