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Unrelated to my other comment, who owns the rights to BeOS these days? Palm seems to have sold it off to a company called ACCESS? But they don't seem to have any intention of doing anything with it, and I can't imagine the source is worth much to them. How reasonable is it for a company to push a two decade old project into the public (after taking the basic steps of deleting any licensed code and employee details)?

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Extracting the licensed 3rd party code and doing the other cleanup needed to do a release would be a chore. I have done this for other code bases and it always ends up being a lot of work that involves lawyers.

The BeOS code wasn’t huge (I remember the tarball being 98mb) but there was licensed code in the codecs, drivers, compilers, dev tools, possibly in NetPositive and more.

It is cool to look at from a historical perspective, which would be the main reason to release it. I wouldn’t advise using the code as a foundation for any future project.

I think it would be interesting to involve the Computer History Museum. I suspect a lot of people would be passionate about helping to archive the project properly. There's a lot of educational value in it, I think.

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