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Magnussoft ZETA, previously '''yellowTAB ZETA''', is an 2007 ZETA is an effort to bring BeOS up to date, adding support for newer hardware, and features that had been introduced in other operating systems in the years since Be Incorporated ceased development in 2001. Among the new features are USB 2.0 support, SATA support, Samba support, a new media player, and enhanced localization of system components. Unlike Haiku and other open source efforts to recreate some or all of BeOS's functionality from scratch, ZETA is based on the actual BeOS code base, and it is closed source. ZETA has contributed to an increase in activity in the BeOS commercial software market, with a number of new products for both ZETA and the earlier BeOS being released. However, some critics point to a list of goals for the first release that do not appear to have been met (including Java 1.4.2 and ODBC support). Other reviewers point to bugs that still exist from BeOS, and question whether yellowTAB has the complete access to the source code they would need to make significant updates. The system has also come under heavy criticism from BeOS developers for undocumented changes in the system messaging system. These changes can break compilation of code, and in some cases (most notably Mozilla ), break the actual application if any code optimizations are applied, resulting in much slower builds http://www.livejournal.com/community/bezilla/64711.html. Additional controversy has come from their bundling of Gobe Productive in a licensing deal which Gobe had disputed. YellowTAB promoted ZETA mainly in the German market, where it used to be sold through Infomercial s and on RTL Shop , and in Japan . Prior to Magnussoft stopping the distribution of ZETA, it was mainly distributed directly by magnussoft. VERSIONS CRITICISM ZETA and yellowTAB have been surrounded by controversy. Critics of yellowTAB questioned for a long time the legality of ZETA, and whether yellowTAB had legal access to the sources of BeOS;http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=4734&limit=no#150413http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5496/44/#comments it is now known that yellowTAB could not have developed ZETA to the extent that they did without access to the source code, but doubts remain as to whether yellowTAB actually had legal access to the code or not. Furthermore, critics did not see ZETA as real advancement of BeOS, but rather as an unfinished and buggy operating system loaded with third party applications that were either obsolete, unsupported, or non-functional. This was particularly true in the initial releases of ZETA, and it was in clear conflict with the attention to detail that BeOS used to stand for, disappointing the BeOS community who at one point had high expectations for ZETA. While yellowTAB did clean up the selection of bundled applications in following versions, ZETA remains somewhat unstable when compared to other modern desktop operating systems. But perhaps the most criticized practice by yellowTAB was its tendency to make claims that turned out to be either half truths or vague enough that they could not be confirmed. Not only did yellowTAB announce certain developments that never materialized (such as Java, and ODBC among others), but it would also support certain capabilities beyond what ZETA was actually capable of (e.g., compatibility with MS Office). According to sources close to yellowTAB, this is believed to have lead to a high return rate from customers that bought ZETA from the German RTL TV shopping channel, and the reason for which RTL eventually stopped selling the product. Another issue that has been brought up by the BeOS community is the fact that magnussoft has never released any free-of-charge versions of Zeta. Be Inc. used to offer BeOS Personal Edition free of charge, which was of great help to those who wanted to test BeOS. The lack of a trial version saw Zeta seriously confined to the limits of the older BeOS community. Nevertheless, there is a Students Edition which can be obtained, at the price of 49 euros, from Zeta-OS.com . CEASE OF DISTRIBUTION A cease of distribution letter was posted by Magnussoft at 05 April 2007. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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