Be Inc. Goes Public on Nasdaq Under the Ticker BEOS
The company behind BeOS — the operating system Haiku would later reimplement as open source — completed its IPO in July 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, years before the open-source project this blog covers even began.
In July 1999, Be Inc. completed its initial public offering, selling 6,000,000 shares of common stock at $6.00 per share on the Nasdaq National Market under the ticker symbol BEOS — a company built entirely around an operating system, going public years before that operating system’s open-source successor, Haiku, would even begin as a project.
What Be Inc. actually was
Be Inc. was founded by former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée to build BeOS, a modern operating system designed from scratch around symmetric multiprocessing, pervasive multithreading, and a media-centric architecture — sold initially on custom BeBox hardware, then later as software for existing PowerPC Macs and, eventually, Intel-compatible PCs.
The IPO itself
The offering raised approximately $32.2 million in net proceeds for the company, with underwriters exercising their over-allotment option the following month for an additional $3.1 million. The IPO came during the peak of the late-1990s dot-com boom, when public market enthusiasm for technology and internet-adjacent companies was at its highest.
Why the company didn’t survive long after this
Despite the successful IPO, Be Inc. never achieved the hardware or software market traction its technology arguably deserved, competing against both Windows and Mac OS for a share of desktop operating systems that neither Microsoft nor Apple was going to concede easily. Be Inc.’s assets — patents and engineering talent, not the ongoing operating system business itself — were acquired by Palm, Inc. in 2001, and the company as a public entity ceased to exist afterward.
The connection to this blog’s actual subject
BeOS’s source code was never open-sourced by Be Inc. itself before its assets were sold off — Haiku, the open-source operating system this blog covers extensively, is a from-scratch reimplementation of BeOS’s design and API, begun years after Be Inc.’s IPO and eventual dissolution, by developers who wanted the operating system’s ideas to continue existing in a form no single company’s business fortunes could end.
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