Be sold it's intellectual property to Palm Computing, and retained only hard assets and the right to proceeds from any legal actions. The assets were liquidated and the board adopted a plan (Sept 2001) to dissolve and distribute the proceeds from any legal actions in an orderly fashion.

Note that Delaware law allows dissolutions to be abandoned provided the board so desires:

(e) The resolution authorizing a proposed dissolution may provide that notwithstanding authorization or consent to the proposed dissolution by the stockholders, or the members of a nonstock corporation pursuant to § 276 of this title, the board of directors or governing body may abandon such proposed dissolution without further action by the stockholders or members.

In 2000, Be itself announced a change of direction and halted all work on the OS. It pursued development of an internet appliance (BeIA) which never took off and resulted ultimately in the sale of the company's intellectual property for 11 million dollars. BeOS was declared abandoned and dead in the tech press. Earlier Be had an agreement with a company in Europe called Yellow Tab.

Yellow Tab is reputed to have a license to distribute the product (probably outside the US) and they have the ability to work with the source code to develop these distributions. Yellow Tab continues to work toward the end of distributing BeOS. Palm owns the BeOS name so Yellow Tab uses the name Zeta to avoid any conflict. YT has employees and a plan to release an enhanced commercial product soon.

BeUnited and OpenBeOS are partner organizations that sprung forth from the enthusiastic developer community. They are working to recreate BeOS using an open source approach. BeOS has a well documented API and significant portions were opened up in the past. Creating a binary compatable release will allow all the many original apps for BeOS to be run. It also allows app developers to know that they can develop and release commercial apps today and that some company cannot take control away from them.

BeUnited is the umbrella organization seeking to keep things orderly, fair, and efficient by working with standards and documents. BeUnited will establish the new name and non-profit funding mechanisms to distribute contributions.

OpenBeOS (under the MIT license) is writing the code and maintaining the source trees. Phase one is to recreate BeOS Version 5. Phase 2 (called glass elevator) will begin to improve and extend the new code. Phase one is going on 2 years and seems to be building speed (about 2/3 complete by 53 different contributors). As sections are completed they can be used and tested with the original V5.0 code.

Recreating the original design has resulted in a well thought plan for Glass Elevator and there is significant interest in getting Phase 1 done so the fun can really start.

If this is such a great plan then why have others gone their own way?

There are 4 or so versions of BeOS growing in the wilds plus Zeta -- Blue eyed OS, Cosmoe, Sequel and Befree. These are all works inspired by BeOS but going in a slightly different direction than OpenBeOS. All these development efforts help build a deeper understanding and experience of the basic architecture.