| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
yellowTAB Zeta is an operating system developed by yellowTAB of Germany based on the BeOS operating system developed by Be Incorporated. Currently at the public Release Candidate phase, the only available version is Zeta Neo. yellowTAB plan to release Deluxe, Home and Student versions.
The Zeta operating system is an attempt to bring BeOS up to date, adding modern features like USB support, that have been introduced in competing operating systems in the years since Be Incorporated ceased development.
However, some commentators point to a list of goals for the first non-beta release that do not appear to have been met (including Java 1.4.2 and ODBC support). Other reviewers point to the bugs that still exist from the original BeOS operating system and question whether yellowTAB have the complete access to the source code they would need to make significant updates.
Additional controversy has come from their bundling of Gobe Productive in a licencing deal which Gobe has disputed. Neither side will conceed that the other is wrong, yellowTAB continues to bundle Productive 2.01 with Zeta, and Gobe continues demanding $49 a copy from users.
However, despite the criticism, Zeta has contributed to revitalising the BeOS commercial software market, with a number of new products for both Zeta and pure BeOS being released, including a CAD clone called AtomoCAD .
In October 2004, yellowTAB announced after three release candidates that the next level of pre-releases will be called Zeta Neo . The reason for the name change is down to the largely increased feature set. New features include VOIP support, and a new media player, as well as enhanced development tools and IDE support.
The product has come under ridicule from some sources after a series of "Schoolboy Errors" were made, including RC1 having a broken loopback adapter, one of their updaters containing a shell script that could not complete sucessfully, and gzip being missing in Neo despite it being present in every BeOS release.