[TwoFx]

Access has been somewhat reluctant to make BeOS-related material available in the past. For example, they did provide access to the BeOS API documentation (called the Be Book) to the Haiku project, but only under a restrictive no-derivatives license (see [1]). This has caused some pain the past, as extra care must be taken that Haiku's API documentation, the Haiku Book [2], is not a derivative work, so everything had to be rewritten from scratch, even documentation for parts of the API that are largely unchanged.

[1] https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/LegalNotice.html

[2] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/index.html

[pram]

What a joke. Gotta protect the future of those massive profits from BeOS sales I guess.

[memsom]

The BeOS source is not clean. It had loads of third party closed source licensed stuff in the tree. It is also massive, it is a complete OS and most of the supporting apps source code. It would be non trivial to make it open and it would not compile cleanly as massive gobs of drivers and low level stuff (like font rendering engines) would be gone. And there are the unfortunate GPL violations. It would also need a lot of work to manage any opensourcing effort.