The History of Haiku: BeOS's Second Life as an Open-Source OS
How a well-regarded but commercially unsuccessful 1990s operating system, killed off by an acquisition, was rebuilt from scratch as open source by the community that refused to let it disappear.
Haiku exists because a group of BeOS users and developers, in 2001, refused to accept that a well-loved operating system’s commercial death meant the system itself had to disappear. What they built afterward is, technically, a completely new implementation — but one deliberately aimed at continuing exactly what the original was trying to be.
Be Inc. and BeOS, 1990–2001
Be Inc. was founded in 1990 by Jean-Louis Gassée — a former Apple executive — together with Steve Sakoman, based in Menlo Park, California. The company’s goal was an entirely new operating system, written in C++, unconstrained by backward compatibility with any existing platform. Be initially built its own hardware to run it: the BeBox, released in October 1995, a distinctive dual-PowerPC machine with a front panel of activity-indicator lights and an unusual analog/digital expansion port. When the BeBox failed commercially, Be exited hardware entirely and ported BeOS to the PowerPC Macintosh and, later, to x86 PCs — chasing a viable path to market for the OS itself, independent of any one hardware platform.
The end of Be Inc.
That path never fully materialized. After a final pivot toward internet appliances (BeIA), Be Inc.’s assets were acquired by Palm, Inc. in 2001, and BeOS development ended.
OpenBeOS begins — literally the next day
Michael Phipps started the OpenBeOS project the day after the Palm acquisition was announced, aiming to build an open-source, backward-compatible continuation of BeOS from scratch — not by open-sourcing Be’s original codebase (which Palm now owned), but by reimplementing the system independently. The new project got a significant technical head start in 2002, when it forked NewOS — a modular kernel already written independently by Travis Geiselbrecht, a former Be Inc. engineer — giving OpenBeOS a working kernel foundation rather than requiring one to be built from zero.
The rename to Haiku, 2004
By 2004, Palm’s trademark ownership of the “BeOS” name made continuing to use “OpenBeOS” as a long-term project identity legally awkward. At the project’s first North American developer conference, WalterCon, held that year, the project announced it had been renamed Haiku — chosen by community vote, and a deliberate reference to the short, distinctively-worded error messages BeOS itself was known for displaying, in the style of Japanese haiku poetry.
From rename to a usable release
Development continued for years afterward before the project had something the public could actually run: Haiku R1/Alpha 1 shipped on September 14, 2009 — the first version available as a bootable live CD, a meaningful practical improvement over original BeOS’s installation requirements. Three further alpha releases followed through 2012, setting up the much longer stretch of work — including packagefs and modern package management, which went live in 2013 — that eventually led to Haiku’s first beta release in 2018.
Why “continuation,” not “clone,” is the right word
Haiku isn’t running any of Be Inc.’s original code — the kernel, the Kit-based API, and BFS are independent (re-)implementations, built by a different group of people over a different span of years. What makes “continuation” the accurate description rather than “clone” is intent and design philosophy: Haiku was built specifically to preserve BeOS’s particular architectural bets — a pervasively multithreaded kernel, a database-like file system, an object-oriented native API — rather than to imitate its surface appearance while making unrelated internal choices. A community that lost access to software it valued, in 2001, chose to rebuild the thing itself rather than settle for something merely similar — and the project, now in its third decade, is still doing exactly that.
Sources: Be Inc. — Wikipedia, BeOS — Wikipedia, Haiku (operating system) — Wikipedia, Project History — Haiku Project, Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1