> > I haven't anywhere heard them say support will end. > > Quite the reverse, in fact. > ??? Nobody got an official statement from Be... But how can they make money > from a product, when they are giving it away for free? How do they pay the > guys in the support? It seems that they only focus on Stinger (AFAIK a sort > of set-top-box OS), Well let's here it from the horses mouth (excerpts from Be interview at www.lebuzz.com): "Self...the Stinger is a particular manifestation of that, which is oriented towards the internet appliance realm. It's sort of, if you took a slice of what we're doing, oriented towards internet appliances, that would be Stinger. What we are bringing together is more than just an operating system. Interviewer: So how in the heck are you guys giving it away for free? I mean, how can you make any money? Self: Well that's a great question. There's two things. One of the things we think we need to do is vastly increase installed base for our developers. We think that this is going to be the most rapid way to do that. Secondly, the free version will have some components missing, although it will be fully working. It won't be like it will be timed out or anything like that. So there will be some publishers offering an enhanced version. So you can kind of think of it similarly to RedHat where there's going to be value added for people who go out and buy the CD versions of it. We think that, really, what we've got to do is increase our installed base there, and then that's going to give us lots of opportunity to make money in the future [ Isn't this similar to what Corel are doing with their Linux distribution and what Sun have done with Solaris? ] Interviewer: Sure tha's fine. Now getting back to the audio end of things, which is kind of where my loyalty is like and you know to be honest, you know, the last time we chatted I was really looking forward to some of the exciting announcements we guys had made about, you know like, major companies like Steinberg and Creamware coming out with this, with these great audio applications for the BeOS. Is that, you know, are they dropping it, or what's going on there? Self: I think that's going to be, you know, that's better asked to the individual companies. We hope they don't. We're working hard to keep them in the fold, but, you know, some of them will see this new strategy as not fitting with their own strategies, I'm sure. So some of them will see it as actually enhancing what they're doing, so I think, you know, it remains to be seen on what happens there. I think the thing for us was that we were looking at these application developers and the applications were coming out more slowly for lots of reasons than we would have liked and that was part of why we said we gotta do it, we gotta headed for different market strategies and it's now a year later and that requires kind of rethinking the whole thing. .....(we're) trying to encourage all our developers to say, look, here is an opportunity for you to include BeOS with your application, you know. And, either the free version or the enhanced version whichever they choose to include. Interviewer: So, you know, with Release 5, what's going to be new in that? Self: Well. We haven't really announced all the details on that, but the big things in Release 5 are there will be FireWire and DV support, and there's an enhanced USB support, and there is... the Media Kit has gotten, gained a number of new drivers and a number of new nodes, namely we have a multichannel audio node for working...So it's a single way to work with the multichannel audio cards...." -------------------------xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx----------------------------- -------- (Please see http://www.lebuzz.com/ for full transcript.) > > Maybe if just a quarter of this list were to email and encourage > > Be to clear up some of the 'FUD' perhaps Emagic et al would get some > > of the reassurance they feel they need to continue. > THIS comes to the main problem: Emagic has to plan for the future and I > think, that Emagic simply can't _TRUST_ a company that didn't gave a clean > statement in the last weeks. Is it all going to end because of one, admittedly ill thought out, statement? Have Apple and Microsoft been such models of consistency in the past? Amidst all the 'Digital Convergence' hype and the NASDAQ breathing down their neck maybe things like announcements got mangled in the rush. My final plea - What do Emagic need to still believe in Be? Ade (Sorry about lengthy post, BTW. Excerpts are trimmed as far as possible.)