Scarabeos 2001 - Save Your BeOS!

**STOP THE DEAL WITH PALM NOW! EVERY SHARE THAT DOESN'T TAKE PART IS A VOTE AGAINST THE DEAL!**
**AFTER THE PALM-CEO BEING DROPPED AND SOON HUNDREDS MORE BEING FIRED AT PALM THE ALTERNATIVES ARE CLEAR:**
**BEOS-QUASI-GPL OR THE "AMIGA OS-METHOD"! BEOS FOREVER! 10.11.2001**
The Scarabeos 2001 Project - Save Your BeOS! September, 15, 2001 Why We Are Here We, a group of BeOS shareholders, have formed the Scarabeos 2001 project in the belief that BeOS / BeIA can only be saved if we prevent the deal with Palm Inc. since the vast majority of Be Inc. shares belongs to small shareholders, we can achieve that. if Palm Inc. doesn't relicense BeOS / BeIA under a Open Source license by itself, they should be issued under a GPL-like license. What We Want The "Scarabeos2001/openBeOS-openBeIA-Committee" wants to put BeOS/BeIA under a GPL-oriented licence, if Palm Inc./Be Inc. don't release BeOS under an open-source licence. (Like Sun Microsystems did with "StarOffice" and Netscape with their web browser). Because Be Inc. CEO Jean-Louis Gassée and the other remaining "big" shareholders keep only 20% out of the total amount of shares, the chances to stop the Palm Inc./Be Inc. deal seem to be very good. 80% of the shares are being hold by the BeOS-fans everywhere. There is no other perspective for BeOS: Be Inc. has no money left and it won't be able to sell this product during the economic crisis. BeIA is a beautiful operating system, but it was also a huge mistake. We believe in BeOS and we are absolutely sure that Palm will not continue to support our OS. So our GPL-like licence is the only remaining possibility. How You Can Help We want your ideas about everything involved with our project. If you are a BeOS shareholder, please fill out our form . We need translators for French, Spanish and Italian! Spread the word about this project on news sites, in user groups, everywhere! Project Scarabeos mail address What you will find further down this page: Background information The End? The Alternative The Danger Why Stopping The Deal License Questions Differences Between The GPL And Our Proposed OpenBeOS License Why A GPL-like License? Organizing The Share Collection Divided We Fall Status, Committee Address Background Information The End? On August, 16th, the Be Inc. managing board sold all developed products for 11 Million $ in shares to Palm Inc. The development of these excellent products used up more than 100 Million $. According to insider information, however, Palm will neither keep up the development of the operating systems BeOS and BeIA, nor will they issue them under an Open Source license to the interested public. The shareholders get an even rougher end of this deal: not only has the stock market price of Be Inc. shares dropped for almost 99% since the IPO, but also is the contract not legally binding, since the shareholders haven't approved of it yet. Thus the shares haven't been sold and their value has dropped by 33% again since August, 16. At this point, Be Inc. owned about 3 Million $ in own cash. It isn't very hard to imagine that the shareholders will end up with small change: 20 to 25 Cent per share at best, but given the current economical situation, even that amount is bound to decline sharply. top The Alternative Media and informed insiders had been hinting that upcoming versions of Be's products would finally live up to long-standing expectations. BeIA was in production (eVilla by Sony). Palm however is only interested in the human capital of Be. BeIA might be a potential competitor for them. Furthermore do recent advancements by Microsoft like much enhanced versions of WinCE or embedded WinXP mean even more trouble for Palm. Palm doesn't want to end up like another Netscape. Knowing the potential, we ask: Wouldn't an OpenBeOS be the last chance? top The Danger So far the future of Gobe Productive 3.0 isn't clear, it would be bad if it was the last version. StarOffice 6.0, Opera 5 and others have been postponed because of the missing BONE technology and the overall uncertain future. More and more companies are abandoning BeOS, especially in the games sector. Are we doomed to roam the surface of this planet in disarray, living of the dreams of a glorious past and mourning our loss loudly (hi, Amiga users ;-))? We say: NO! top Why Stopping The Deal? Kill the deal so that BeOS/BeIA might live! We shareholders, some having lost thousands of Dollars, don't need to worry about the remaining Cents. Imagine this: You have 100 shares which add up to some 12$. Given the selling fees, you are left with 4$. Having lost several hundreds of Dollars, does it really matter anymore if you get those 4$? Wouldn't it be more useful for you if you could 'donate' these in order to keep on using the world's best operating system? (And thus providing MS with some headaches for their unfair fight against BeOS, Linux, OS/2?) What's the alternative? Be Inc. is - for all practical matters - broke. Be's employees will be taken over by Palm in any case, if the deal is done or not, no doubt about it. They have done tremendous work, too good to be out of a job. But that topic has been done away with. We can't revive Be Inc., but we have a plan: BeOS and BeIA, having been cleansed of proprietary third party code, will be issued under a modified GPL (similar to Linux). We don't see any danger of other operating systems or companies 'borrowing' from the code: Linux - an interesting project, but not our cup of tea - is too different, but will profit from an OpenBeOS like OpenBeOS will profit from the cooperation of many Linux users and developers. You are welcome! Bill Gates won't use BeOS-Code for Windows, he sure doesn't want to have to put Windows on the 'Net for free. top License Questions Differences Between The GPL And Our Proposed OpenBeOS License The name BeOS/BeIA will be reserved to distributions which had their kernel and other essential parts of their operating system certified. Certification will be done by Be Inc. or another future organization. This process is similar to the Linux kernel development, where Linus Torvalds decides what will be included. Distribution of uncertified modifications is allowed, but not under a name which suggests a connection with BeOS. Commercial distributors are obliged to pay a small amount of licensing fees per manufactured CD box to Be Inc. For example: Company A and company B distribute a BeOS/BeIA box for end users, A distributes 10.000 and B 5.000. A pays Be Inc. (more of a foundation, then) 10.000$ licensing fees, B pays 5.000$. The BeOS user may download OpenBeOS from the servers of those companies, only paying the connection costs, and use this downloaded version for free, whether for personal or for commercial purposes. The companies won't have to pay licensing fees for these downloaded distributions. Two thirds of licensing fees paid will be put into research (like ports to the Sparc- or Alphaarchitecture, driver development, book publishing etc) and social projects (like used PCs with BeOS for Third-World schools). The remaining third will be spend on internal tasks, like management and - in the long run - balancing payments to the shareholders. Taking into account the difficult situation many developer teams and new BeOS companies will face, it will not be allowed to download BeOS/BeIA, burn it onto a CD and sell these CDs. Same goes for magazine CDs, with the exception of explicit permission by the distributors. You can download and distribute self-made CDs as long as you do not charge money for the work made by others ('covering original cost' is regarded as a pretense). top Why A GPL-like License? Keeping Be Inc. alive? But ... currently you do not get any venture capital and there's no money in the stock markets, either. Recall the last week with tech stocks plummeting. Be Inc. still has 50 employees, and you'd probably need more, but those people had to be paid. The distribution agreements with Koch Media, Apacabar, Gobe etc. are not cost-effective. People on the street either want a free Personal Edition (PE) or a perfect NT/2000/XP replacement. Furthermore the fact that Adobe, Macromedia, Quark and others don't want to port their products (under current circumstances) does not leave room for alternatives. One might issue a (commercial) PE 5.1 with less features, but with the intent to keep the interest and the development efforts alive and then fork a 'pro' edition with 6.0 - having a free BeOS 'for the masses' and some sort of commercial NT replacement - but Be Inc. can't possibly support two lines of development. And nobody would buy a 'Pro'-Edition when there's an almost identical PE available for free on the 'Net. It's very easy: There are no alternatives to the modified GPL model. None other than the demise of BeOS, that is ... The modified GPL allows developers to write their own proprietary and / or commercial applications or port applications from other platforms. It's up to the developer to decide if he wants to charge distributors for distributing CDs with his work. Distributors on the other hand can distinguish themselves by supplying commercial and / or proprietary applications with their distributions. top Organizing The Share Collection Be Inc. shares are mostly held by small shareholders, just 20% are in the hands of the managing board or institutional investors. Intel and all the other 'Big Shots' have already left the boat, Palm has no shares since it doesn't want the company, but it's human capital. The managing board isn't to blame for the sell-out. They had no choice. But the shareholders of course have all the right in the world to renounce Palm's alms. All the more since Be Inc. is free of debts, after all. We, a large number of shareholders, will send an authorized representative to the general business meeting in California. Join us! If you are a 'big small' shareholder (10.000 shares and more) or if you want, get your warrants (tickets, voting cards) and pass them to us. If it's possible (as American) to vote for our concept through your bank in the U.S., then you don't even need to go personally there. But what if you've only got 40, 100 or 250 shares? You might think "Is it really worth the trouble?" In Germany: Transmitting shares to depots at other institutes isn't cheap, except for you are customer of one of the big direct brokers. But even if you've got a depot at your bank, please do not hesitate to fill out our survey! We will analyze information we get via the survey right away and you will get an email with further information! Some short explanations first: Of course we will cooperate with notaries and lawyers, we want full transparancy! All transactions will be annuled after the meeting and you will get your shares back. Privacy of your data is ensured (read below). In detail: If you are a customer of comdirekt, Commerzbank, Entrium, Diraba, Consors or Maxblue/DB24, you should have your 'own' common depot, together with other BeOS shareholders at the same institute. We are still looking for BeOS users to administer common depots. Supports get a receipt for their contribution. Important: Except for Diraba, the transfer of shares between depots of the same institute usually is free of cost! Transfers of shares to other institutes, however, are usually quite expensive and thus aren't a valid option for people with just a few shares. But even in this case: fill out the survey! This will give us the opportunity to form depots at local banks and then transfer them once, thus saving quite an amount of costs. The privacy of your data is guaranteed during the whole process. In the U.S.: Go to the general business meeting or contact other BeOS-fans and Be Inc.-shareholders you know, one of you guys can go to the general business meeting and kick ass. But please inform us that you'll be there and you're on our side. We got to know if it makes any sense! top Divided We Fall Each small shareholder on his or her own has no say in the matter. Only if we stand united, we have a chance. Moreover, if you are not located in the US, you won't be invited to the general meeting, you can't deposit your papers there easily. And you sure won't just cross your respective ocean just to attend the 'funeral'. Help yourself! Help us! Help BeOS! Please fill out this form! Let's skip those petitions to Palm, let's fight for our own interests! All we want to talk with Palm about is the kind of Open Source model, nothing else! Time's short! If we don't succeed now, we will not have the chance for another fight! Status Before we formed this project, we already had contacts to numerous shareholders. Before we started this campaign! Time's short and there's some really tough work to do. But we can do it. Please: get in touch! OpenBeOS/Scarabeos - Kommitee Kontakt: Horst Ebenhöh Vacher Str. 268 90768 Fürth / Bay. Tel. 0174 / 9364 958 e-Mail top