BeOS BeGone?
 

Whatever happened to BeOS? I heard it was going to be the next best thing and kick Windows in the teeth, then it disappeared. I was wanting to try it and it just disappeared.

BeOS was a fairly decent little operating system, but unfortunately Be's business plan was pretty much:
1) Build decent operating system.
2) Sell to Apple.
3) Profit!

The sell to apple part never happened, and it never was a commercial success on its own. IIRC free versions can be had nowadays, if you'd like to give it a test drive.

BeOS is now dead, but there are two different versions which aim to be compatible and provide a similar experience. One is Zeta, but the preferred one is Haiku because it is open source and has a good amount of development going into it. Hardware support is still weak, but it should work in a virtual machine like VMWare Player or VirtualBox.

So one could use Jam and only Jam if they wanted to help with Haiku development? Sounds like a good way to get started to me, but maybe OpenOffice would be better, as they don't limit you to one development tool. I can understand why they want to limit it, but I don't understand why they chose Jam. GCC would be a likely better choice since it's more widely used and supported.

Know what the limitations of Jam are compared to GCC? They have a link about comparing Jam to other languages, but I couldn't gleen anything at a glance (in other words, they don't spell it out, kinda like Linux documentation).