I was reading an article on OSNews recently on Zeta 1.5.

For those who don't know, Zeta is one of the many 'continuations' of the BeOS, and it is the only commercial BeOS distribution.

Since it is commercial, you would think that you would get top notch support, and the ability to get upgrades without many hurdles. This however has not been the case with Zeta (formerly known at YelloTab Zeta). The company that developed it before (YellowTab) went belly up and they sold things off to Magnussoft. Again, for those who don't know, if you needed to update (and you did need to update because releases were buggy), you needed to send in your original purchased disc back to Germany, and they would send you back another disc with the updated OS - what a pain! This is an inconvenience you don't have with other commercial operating systems.

The recent review was not a stellar review of the OS, as far as I am concerned. So the real question here is: "is zeta still relevant?"

We've got Haiku, PhOS, and BeOS Max available. BeOS Max is a working BeOS r5 distribution that works rather well. PhOS is based on unreleased BeOS r6 (Dan0) code making it illegal...but the website and ISOs are still up, so I guess you could conceivably install it on your PC. Finally, Haiku is making great strides at rebuilding BeOS from scratch, making an OS that is both backward compatible with the original BeOS, and fix the problems inherent in the original BeOS. The two things that these three projects have in common are that they all aim to continue the legacy of the BeOS and they are all Free! Yes, you read right, Free - you can go download and install right now, it will only cost you a CD-R and approximately 600 downloaded megabytes.

From this perspective, Zeta, for what it offers, is over priced, cumbersome to upgrade and highly irrelevant in today's world!

If it wowed the crowds with it's amazing stability, features, and comparable built-in apps I would not be here commenting on it, however it amazes me that money is still poured into this project and people are still buying it! I suppose there are enough geeks like me that would buy it just to try it out, but the business model is obviously a failed one.

What do you think? Is it still relevant? Should it close it's doors down?