<A HREF="http://www.beincorporated.com/"
  >Be, Inc.</A> Be*(OS).

Be, Inc. sold its intellectual property assets to <A HREF="http://www.palm.com"
  >Palm, Inc.</A> in late 2001 and then it is dissolving.

<A HREF="http://openbeos.org/"
  >OpenBeOS</A> project is trying to rewrite and then extend BeOS. The _(kernel) is based on one created by Travis Geiselbrecht called <A HREF="http://newos.sourceforge.net/"
  >NewOS</A>.

See also <A HREF="http://www.bebits.com/"
  >BeBits</A>, a repository of BeOS software and <A HREF="http://www.beunited.org/"
  >beunited.org</A> for the Open Standards BeOS-compatible Operating System (OSBOS) specification.

Travis Geiselbrecht used to be a Be kernel engineer; he wrote NewOS after
he got laid off. IMO, BeOS was one of the best systems ever ,in that it boots
in +/- 15 seconds (faster than anything I've seen except maybe CP/M-86 ;-).
Also, again IMO, it's truly crash-proof-I've never had any problems with stability. I recommend getting the current BeOS 5 PE Max distro from www.bebits.com. The Max distro's are free CD images, so go ahead and look for them. As of this writing (02/07/03), the current version is Max 2.1, and it's a 223MB .zip file (includes Nero cue files and patches to make it work right on Pentium 4 and Athlon XP systems).
 