yellowTAB

» see yellowtab.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Be Inc. stopped developing BeOS in 2001 and sold its assets to Palm. What it left behind was an operating system that a few tens of thousands of people considered the best-designed desktop of the nineties, plus an unreleased successor build numbered 5.1.0 and known as Dano. There was no legal way for anybody to continue either one. The Dano build got out anyway, and that is the material yellowTAB was made of.

The company was set up in 2001 by a team of ten, headquartered in Mannheim, with Bernd Korz as managing director and a corporate motto in English that read Assume The Power. Its product was ZETA, which was BeOS brought up to date: drivers for hardware made after 1999, a video editor, and the modern browser the original never got. Release candidates ran through 2004, the last one named Neo shipping on 15 October. ZETA 1.0 arrived on 24 June 2005 and 1.1 followed that October, with 1.2 the next April.

This never came near me and it was never going to. I was in Turkey on Windows and a TTNet line, and ZETA was a German-language boxed product for people who had already decided that the Be way of doing things was correct and had been waiting four years for somebody to sell it to them again. yellowTAB never published a sales figure, and the community estimates of how many copies of ZETA ever shipped run in the low tens of thousands.

~ the dossier ~

~ sold on a shopping channel ~

The distribution was the strangest thing about it. ZETA went out through ordinary German software retail and through RTL Shop, a television shopping channel, which meant a desktop operating system for a dead platform was being demonstrated in the same hour as cookware. yellowTAB had studied why Be Inc. died and concluded that giving the thing away for free had been the error, so there was deliberately no free personal edition. You paid, or you did not run it.

The upgrade from 1.21 to 1.5 cost ten euros.

~ the license nobody ever saw ~

yellowTAB always said it had negotiated a license with PalmSource around 2002 that covered its use and modification of the BeOS source. It never published the agreement or described its terms, and asking about it became a running feature of every interview Korz gave.

When Access Co. of Japan bought PalmSource in 2005, the BeOS copyrights went with it, and Access was considerably less diplomatic. David Schlesinger of Access stated flatly that no license agreement covering yellowTAB's use of the code had ever existed and that ZETA was therefore an infringing copy. He added that Access had sent cease and desist letters on a number of occasions and that they had been uniformly ignored.

Nobody ever sued. There was no money in the defendant to go after and the product was already on its way out. The allegation alone was enough, because a retail channel will not carry a boxed product whose copyright status is publicly disputed by the copyright holder.

~ what came after ~

Insolvency proceedings against yellowTAB were filed in April 2006. magnussoft, another German publisher, picked up distribution and development in May and Korz moved across with it, which is how version 1.21 came out in September 2006 with a different company's name on the front. Version 1.5 shipped on 28 February 2007 and a service pack followed in March. magnussoft stopped funding development on 16 March 2007, citing sales, and pulled the product from sale entirely on 5 April after the Access statements.

The code is unavailable and will stay that way, because it is a proprietary fork of a proprietary system owned by a company with no interest in either. Nothing was rescued from it and nothing was ported out of it.

Haiku, the other answer to the same problem, was started in 2001 by people who chose to rewrite BeOS from nothing rather than use a line of the original. It took them until 2009 to reach a first alpha and until 2021 to reach a beta anybody would call usable. They are still going, twenty-five years in, on a codebase nobody can send a letter about.

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