BeOS Marches On

Be Inc. may be dead but their baby, BeOS, refuses to die. While the users of other failed platforms eventually have had to migrate to something else once the software and hardware became unmaintainable through total obsolescence, BeOS lovers are fighting back.

There are not one but five active efforts to revive BeOS in some form or another:
BeFree
BlueEyedOS
Cosmoe
Haiku
Zeta

With the exception of Zeta, all are under some kind of open source license. When Be Inc. died they sold the BeOS code to Palm, who in turn came to some kind of deal to share that code with YellowTab, the people behind Zeta.

My preferred project is Haiku, formerly called OpenBeOS. These guys aim to recreate BeOS R5 from scratch, with some improvements, then they are going to extend it. Here's some recent news about Haiku and Zeta making progress in their efforts.

You can keep up with the community with beunited.org.