"...Some in the community met the news with relief.
Others simply seem exhausted by the endless process of battling
ridiculous odds, and are ready to move on to something else. But
many still believe deeply in what Be is and what they've created.
Believe that there is a way to best Microsoft at its own game
(without having to tread the open-source quagmire). Believe that
there is no better desktop user experience, period.
But the reality is that Be's failure has made a point to the
world, to whit: "Don't bother trying to create a better commercial
desktop OS - it doesn't matter how hard you try, how many engineers
you throw at the problem, how much money you spend, or how many
years you put into it. Microsoft owns that space and, worse, the
public is totally complicit with that fact. People will not stop
using Windows. It is a losing battle."
It is unlikely now that anyone will ever again attempt what Be,
Amiga, and IBM attempted. And that's the saddest thing of all - the
insidious ways in which the monopoly has wormed itself into the
fabric of our economy and culture. The message that "resistance is
futile" has been hammered home. The only OS projects that stand a
chance are open source, because they don't play by the rules of the
economy. But open-source projects seem either unable or unwilling
to create a system that approaches the elegance, speed, and
ease-of-use of BeOS. If you want an x86 system with a future,
you're now bound either to the mess of GNU/Linux or to the Windows
donkey cart, with all of the political and technological baggage
that entails."
