[clxxx]

> With everything surrounding the demise of Be being highly litigious, it is no surprise that the project wished to avoid legal complications over their name. They chose Haiku.

> Why did they choose the name Haiku? Error messages from many applications in BeOS are written in haikus. Additionally, they felt that the art of haiku was representative of the elegance and simplicity of BeOS.

It seems Haiku is BeOS, just renamed.

[Thorrez]

It's a rewrite:

> an open source project was started whose aim was to recreate BeOS from scratch with full binary and source compatibility. This was OpenBeOS. The first release in 2002 was a community update to BeOS 5.0.3 with some open source replacements for Be code. The project name changed in 2004. With everything surrounding the demise of Be being highly litigious, it is no surprise that the project wished to avoid legal complications over their name. They chose Haiku.