ACCESS Co. Releases BeBook and Be Newsletters
We are very pleased to announce that ACCESS Co. Ltd., the current holders of the BeOS intellectual property, has responded positively to our request for permission to reproduce the BeBook and all the Be Newsletters. As a result, we will be able to release these BeOS legacy documents under a Creative Commons license.
"ACCESS is very pleased to be able to support the Haiku project by making these documents more widely available to interested developers," comments David "Lefty" Schlesinger, Director of Open Source Technologies at ACCESS Co. Ltd. "We have a long-standing commitment to be good open source community citizens and making these documents available is an expression of that commitment," concludes David.
Since Haiku is an emerging OS platform, reference technical documentation is still hard to come by. The availability of these legacy BeOS documents adds to the useful bibliography that prospective Haiku developers can consult to familiarize themselves with development for our platform. Both the BeBook and the Be Newsletters will be made available at haiku-os.org, and will be directly searchable from our website.
We take the opportunity to express our gratitude to ACCESS Co. for responding to our request, and to David in particular for taking the time to make this happen. ACCESS Co. Ldt. is a global provider of advanced software technologies to the mobile and beyond-PC markets. For more information, check out the ACCESS website.
Comments
That's a positive step. Thanks from me...
and congrats to the team and the community :o)
I wasn't able to find either the BeBook or Be Newsletters
I wasn't able to find either the BeBook or Be Newsletters on their website.
Excellent news; I wonder if
Excellent news; I wonder if this is the beginning of a positive relationship with ACCESS, which seems to have little interest in doing anything with the Be intellectual property on their own. Imagine if they were to donate the original BeOS code to Haiku! Now that Zeta seems to be dead in the water, maybe it's a possibility.
Or maybe it's just wishful thinking ;-) I don't even know if the BeOS code would be useful to the Haiku project.
Great job guys. The more
Great job guys. The more available to developers, the better. :)
I'll go out on a limb and suggest that it is of some limited use
The original BeOS code might serve as a good "reference" platform for tracking down some of the finer binary-compatible details - or learning some little trick that was used for this or that...
But in my opinion (which may not mean much :) - it's of limited use to Haiku at this point. Maybe Haiku could get some drivers or missing pieces from it, but the underlying kernel and app_server design is different-enough that it's not much interchangeable at this point.
It's likely that large portions of it are uncommented, and potentially poorly-written (such as happens in a corporate time-schedule-dependent environment) - making it difficult to incorporate into an OSS project the size of Haiku. Haiku has already re-created many of the "difficult" parts of BeOS.
Opening of the BeOS code may actually harm the development and progress of Haiku more than help it. Imagine if tomorrow you could download a completely functional codebase for BeOS R5, edit it to work on modern hardware, and make your own BeOS distro. Where would that leave Haiku?
- Urias
Update: looks like this is already discussed on the mailing list:
http://www.freelists.org/archives/openbeos/04-2007/msg00020.html
What CC license?
What CC licensed did you convince them to put it under?
A non-copylefted one would be awesome, like the CC Attribution:
http://creativecommons.org/license/results-one?q_1=2&q_1=1&field_commerc...
or register it into the public domain with CC (which I seriously doubt they'd do):
http://creativecommons.org/license/publicdomain-2
Being CC is a good step forward
Congratulations! This is very good news! I would not tarnish this bright comment by thinking of the BeOS code. If anything happens with that, i am pretty sure it will be for the good of Haiku. Many things have been written for the OS, many things are missing. But for now, it is good to know that people can have ACCESS to the whole Be documentation.
Congratulations again!
Great!
Very good news for Haiku community!
Good Stuff!
Great to see a positive approach from Access like that...they're living up to their name! :-)
Dane Scott
TuneTracker Systems
http://www.tunetrackersystems.com
Use of the documentation
I just read at golem.de, that Access claims Zeta to be illegal, and Haiku might be illegal too if it is using intellectual property of the Be Documentation.
I would suggest the HAIKU Developer Team to be very careful with the Documentations given by Access...
better don't use that documentation at this moment...
They might open a file if HAIKU comes to close to BeOs...
found at:
http://www.zeta-os.com/cms/plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?5770.last
and:
http://www.golem.de/0704/51528.html
sofern es sich hierbei um den unveränderten original Code handle sei es kein Problem. Nur sofern es ein neues Produkt sei, das von unter Access' Copyright liegendem Code abgeleitet sei, habe man ein rechtliches Problem.
Dies gelte auch für die Open-Source-Implementierung Haiku, Schlesinger ist überzeugt davon, dass dieses die original Arbeit repräsentiere. Access sei auch kein Feind von Open Source: "Access unterstützt Open-Source-Projekte, dies bezieht sich aber nicht auf Dritte die unseren Quelltext ohne unsere Zustimmung öffnen wollen. Erst recht nicht, wenn die Herkunft dieses Quellcodes höchst fraglich ist", so Schlesinger.
we got permission from ACCESS
I just read at golem.de, that Access claims Zeta to be illegal, and Haiku might be illegal too if it is using intellectual property of the Be Documentation.
I would suggest the HAIKU Developer Team to be very careful with the Documentations given by Access...
better don't use that documentation at this moment...
ACCESS is the legal owner of the IP for the BeOS code and documentation. They'll release the documentation to the open-source community and we are in contact with ACCESS, so there is no connection to Zeta's problems.
Yes please no FUD here
Indeed, it is not the place to talk about those controverses, specially if you have no proof whatsoever. This question can and will be solved elsewhere.
As for BeOS source, even if ACCESS wanted to they couldn't open it in a simple way. It contain materials licenced by Be from other sources that likely won't agree their stuff being opened for them.
It also shouldn't be an excuse for not contributing. Don't be lazy, go coding! :D
We're specifying a "no
We're specifying a "no derivatives, no commercial use, must attribute" CC deed.
No Derivatives...
Not wanting to put a downer on this but...
Unfortunately this announcement appears to be of little practical change to the current status of the BeBook.
If the Work is to be provided under the No Derivatives version of the CC license, as David "Lefty" Schlesinger indicates above, it appears that we would not be able to make any changes to the Work but could only distribute it 'as is'. That means no adding text, no fixing of errors, no changes to the structure etc. as that would then be a derivative work.
The only thing that would change is that beunited or haiku-os.org for example would now be allowed to legally provide the BeBook for download.
indeed
Yes, this is true, but at least Haiku can now officially host this. The BeUnited website might die in the near future (the project is already dead) and we didn't want to host something illegally. The BeBook is just there for reference. We are building our own documentation (Haiku Book), ATM.
Oh Well...
Speaking on a personal level I was hoping to release this
My BeBook
on BeBits fairly soon and this announcement means that it will have to be only for my personal use.
I suppose I'll have to remove the Be Newsletters from BeBits also.
C'est la vie
Meaningless buzzword.
"...the current holders of the BeOS intellectual property"
That must read 'the current holders of the BeOS copyrights/trademarks'.
Please don't lump them together, they're not the same thing.
Besides this little mistake, its good news for Haiku.
Lets hope they will remain this friendly.