BUT. I used and developed for BeOS for many years. And now I've used and developed for MacOSX for many years. And I think Apple made the right decision, both technically and politically.
At the time, NextStep was far more mature. Next was a lot better funded than Be was. And Apple's original DNA was formed in Jobs' image, so he was far better prepared to run the place.
It is possible that Apple would have died, and Be would have suffered the same fate either way.
BeOS is still interesting to me, but mostly in a historical sense. I have to agree that purchasing NeXT was a vastly wiser decision.
EDIT: As a quick addendum to my post: although this has changed in the intervening years, the one thing that Be definitely did have going for it back then was that its kernel was technically superior, delivering mostly the same benefits of a true microkernel design, but with vastly superior performance to Mach. I have no idea what the current state of things would be on that front; between Apple merging BSD into the kernel space and replacing DriverKit (Objective-C) with IOKit (eC++), the differences are probably minimal.
Guess that wasn't good enough for management though. They had to go out in a blaze of "Internet Appliance" glory.
But the user space and the user interface are brilliant!
I would trade Gnome, KDE, Windows, OS X, or $NAMEIT for the BeOS userland any day, both as an end-user (wrt. UI) and as a developer (user-space API). I hope we'll have more choice in the future.
Running BeOS on the metal was amazing - setting a thread to realtime would make it really snappy, and it's just not the same when it's virtualized...
Either that or Haiku has some way to go yet - I can't tell...
EDIT: you know what? actually, this is still really impressive... it DOES behave a lot like BeOS, and it's alpha... I crashed firefox, and gdb popped right up. I dropped into a shell (bash) and there was a GNU style environment right there. That's actually really cool!
But, Linux and MacOS have come pretty far in the intervening 12 years, and without any special hardware to go with it, I just can't muster the excitement to mess around with Haiku.
I wonder if they're doing anything for developers to easily leverage pervasive multithreading, the bare bones fine-grained threading can be a pain to deal with.
