German software company, famous for the fact that after the "death" Be Inc.. continued work on the BeOS operating system. The Germans called their creation Zeta. This system was based on BeOS 5.1.
For the first time, the world community learned about a small company from Mannheim (Mannheim, Germany, Baden-Wurttemberg) in 2005 in Hannover at the annual exhibition CeBIT - it was then that the first version was demonstrated Zeta. The appearance of this operating system has caused a lot of rumors and speculation. After all, the company palm source, to which all assets were transferred Be Inc.. didn't intend to distribute BeOS. The appearance of system codes in the hands of a third-party company seemed suspicious. But yellowTAB rebuffed all attacks, shaking out of nowhere with licenses for processing and distributing the system, obtained from Be, Inc. shortly before the collapse of the latter. It seemed perfectly legal. At least in Germany. This is such an incomprehensible and muddy story.
During the year yellowTAB distributed its operating system. Over 80,000 copies sold in total Zeta. This is much more than she managed to realize herself. Be, Inc. throughout its existence (1990-2001). But even this was not enough. There was not enough money, and it was not possible to gain a critical mass of users. As a result, in 2006 yellowTAB went bankrupt and was acquired by another German company - Magnussoft.
First time Magnussoft tried to support Zeta afloat, financing its further development and renaming it magnussoft ZETA. But in March 2007, the company was forced to abandon this practice - the company turned out to be unprofitable. True, there is another reason for closing the project: too many questions arose regarding all licenses. As a result Zeta repeated the fate of her "parent" BeOS, once again demonstrating that in the modern world, to promote the operating system, its technical excellence alone is not enough.
Currently, the only company that owns the rights to the code BeOS is Japanese
