JLG respondes to Zeta’s issues
0033 - April 11th, 2007
|
|||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||
|
Archive for the ‘News’ Category According to BeOS France (and also ICO and OSNews) now even Jean Louis Gassée, former CEO of Be inc., has something to say about the issues around Zeta’s legality. JLG has confirmed to Remi from BeOS France that at the time that Palmsource was still the legal owner of the ip, yellowTab did not have any agreement with them. As we all know, JLG use to be a board member for Palmsource, and with his background it would likely that he would have known about such an agreement. Update: It seems that in the hurry of posting about the above I misread something. The statements by JLG are from an earlier time, they just were never posted. JLG didn’t actually respond to the recent troubles of Zeta like the title on this post suggests. The statements are still valid though, Remi explains:
Click below for a translation of the text on BeOS France. All the kudos for taking the time to translate it for me go to my Belgian friend Manette, as je ne parle pas Francais…
Sikosis and co. celebrate one year of Haiku podcasts with episode number nine. This episode is about the BeBits app of the year, the various Haiku presentations and much much more. Also there is an interview with Curtis and Urias from the distributed computing Team Haiku. Get the Haiku podcast #09 (in .mp3 format) here, oh and before I forget, Happy Easter!
There has been a lot of activity on the Haiku project website this Easter weekend. Let’s start with the news that Bruno will be giving a presentation titled ‘Introducing the Haiku Operating System’ in Brazil. The presentation will be held on Friday the thirteenth at the International Free Software Forum (FISL 8.0) in Porto Alegre.
Also in the news is an update on the Haiku GSoC adventure. Google has assigned 7 (preliminary) student slots to the project, the exact number of people the team intended to have. The students have been selected out of 42 (!) applications and on April 12 the final list of projects will be posted on code.google.com. Although the students will work on the projects during summer some of them can’t wait, look here! Update: I just came across this very interesting thread on the Haiku forums: Donation, Funding – organized campaign. Initiatives like these can make a difference, I’d love to own an original Haiku T-Shirt, and with buying it make a contribution to the project.
As the saga regarding ZETA’s legality continues, several new pieces of information have surfaced. In the comments for the OSNews “ZETA Timeline,” David Scheslinger has posted a response to some of the questions raised in the timeline article. Schlesinger’s response helps to clear up a few obvious questions – including why ACCESS chose the BitsOfNews.com comments section to make their first public statement on the matter. In addition to the timeline published by OSNews, Haiku developer Marcus Overhagen has written his own summary of the current situation and the events which led to it. Aside from providing a handy overview to those who haven’t followed recent events closely, it also contains English translations of several BerndsWorld.com posts that had previously only been available in German. And finally, there appears to have been some recent public discussion between Schlesinger and Korz. Schlesinger does mention an unsuccessful attempt to make a comment to Korz’s blog (and suggests that the comment was deliberately removed), but the post he mentioned was later visible on BerndsWorld.com. The site appears to be offline at the moment, however, and it’s currenty unknown if the outage is due to technical or legal reasons (the server itself appears to be online, but the page presently displays 403 permission errors).
There have several new developments in the wake of recent comments made by David “Lefty” Schlesinger of ACCESS Ltd.; he recently stated that Bernd Korz never had a legal right to distribute a BeOS derivative. Shortly following Mr. Schlesinger’s comments, Bernd Korz posted a brief response on his blog. The post contains little information beyond mentioning that Bernd is scheduled to consult a lawyer, but he does at least promise some clarification once the discussion has taken place. Schlesinger’s original comments were, in turn, a response to the announcement that Bernd was considering an open source release of some portions of ZETA. The situation has also prompted a response from MagnusSoft – who had still been distributing ZETA following the recent end of their business involvement with Bernd. But due to the statements made by Schlesinger, it was announced today that MagnusSoft will no longer distribute ZETA (1.21 or 1.5) – at least until the legal uncertainties have been resolved. And lastly, OSNews has posted a timeline summarizing the history of ZETA and ZETA development. While a few things are left out (there seems to be no mention of “BeOS NG,” the original product announced by yellowTAB), it does still provide a good overview of the past few years. Update: As 0033 mentions in the comments, there is some good news as well: Vasper from BeOS Max has written on his blog that he has been in contact with David Schlesinger from ACCESS. According to the post, they do not see a reason to interfere with BeOS Max development.
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…
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||