The following is a simplified account of the situation as I understand it:
Be, Inc. sold the bulk of their intellectual property (including BeOS and BeIA) to Palm, Inc. Be, Inc. now exists purely as a business entity with a board of directors and no employees.
Be, Inc. has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, charging that Microsoft is a monopoly whose anti-competitive, monopolistic practices prevented them (and any other competition) from being able to compete in the OS market. While this is probably true, I personally suspect that mis-management and a few stupid decisions may have contributed significantly to Be's demise.
Be's domain name has gone up for sale.
Bids have been made to license or outright buy BeOS from Palm have met without success. Palm has indicated that they have no intention to sell BeOS, support BeOS, continue development for BeOS, license BeOS to another party, or sell BeOS.
The BeBits Store has closed down, citing loss of interest and a high number of chargebacks.
Gobe no longer sells BeOS and future releases of Products are apparently going to be available for Windows but not BeOS.
Companies that promised (and made official announcements complete with release dates!) BeOS versions of their products have cancelled them.
Yellow Tab is no more.
BeOS source code has allegedly leaked, but apparently, no one has actually seen it.
A pre-release, in-development version of BeOS, 1.5d0 Exp/Dano was leaked, giving us some idea of the BeOS that might have been. (Quite sad, really.)
There's a lot of speculation on what's going to happen next. Theories abound.
If you really want to know what's happened and what's going on, a quick search using Google, Altavista, or some other search engine can quickly turn up the whole story. There have been loads of articles, press releases, etc. about it.
It's all such a disgusting, stupid thing to happen. Finally, a modern operating system that actually WORKS and the promise of annoyance-free computing (for me, anyway), and THIS had to happen.
