Zeta 1.21 Pre-Orders Accepted

Magnussoft, the company now responsible for development on Zeta, has announced it is accepting pre-orders for Zeta 1.21. This new release will include multi-user support, will be built with GCC4, among other improvements. Bernd Korz‘s weblog contains more information. Korz was (is?) the CEO of YellowTAB, the company that started Zeta. Read on for a short editorial on this announcement.

The news concerning pre-orders was submitted by fudel; this editorial was written by Thom Holwerda.

I am very happy this announcement has finally been made. The future of Zeta had been shrouded in mist for months, and no clear-cut press release was ever published detailing the fact that Zeta will now be developed by Magnussoft. All we find on YellowTAB’s website is a press release stating that Magnussoft will be the worldwide distributor; nothing is said about the company also being responsible for Zeta development:

“A new distribution partner for the alternative operating system ZETA OS has been announced. The worldwide distribution rights for the ambitious Operating system have been granted to Magnussoft Germany.”

After this, silence. All we could rely on, was an article on a German website (I happen to speak German), which claimed that YellowTAB had gone down, and that Magnussoft would take over not only the distribution, but also the development of Zeta. This has indeed happened.

So, the sequence of events is like this:

  1. YellowTAB develops and sells Zeta;
  2. YellowTAB gets in financial troubles;
  3. YellowTAB announces exclusive distribution rights for Zeta to Magnussoft;
  4. YellowTAB goes bust, broke, bankrupt, whatever term is legally applicable;
  5. Bernd Korz goes to Magnussoft, probably bringing along developers from YellowTAB, to continue Zeta development;
  6. Profit (hopefully).

This sequence was known to people, and is anything but new. However, we at OSNews never really detailed it since so much was unclear, and little in the form of official press releases or whatever has been made available; we cannot report that YellowTAB went bust, without anything to back it up. Now, we can:

“I started today to move my domains. The content of Domains like yellowTAB.com, yellowTAB.de… will go down in short. So if you want to download stuff or archive articles you should do that asap.”

Let’s hope that Magnussoft is able to succeed where YellowTAB failed. I am not only saying this as a BeOS user and zealot (I have been accused of being a zealot of just about anything, but the only accurate accusation is that of me being a BeOS zealot), but also as an operating system enthusiast, who simply wants more choices than Windows and the UNIX-flavour-of-the-day.


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