In what looks like a last-ditch attempt to persuade Jean-Louis Gassee and his Be Inc to see sense over Apple Computer Inc’s desire either to license BeOS or buy the company, Apple has reportedly turned to NeXT Software Inc and begun talks with another Apple alumnus, this time the Cupertino company’s co- founder on either buying or licensing the NeXT- step operating system. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company has even had technical talks with Sun Microsystems Inc about adopting that company’s Solaris version of Unix. Jobs was laconic about the talks, telling the paper I’ve given them a little bit of advice, but that’s about it, while Apple and Sun both declined to comment. Apple is said to want to announce its decision at the MacWorld trade show, to be held in San Francisco in three weeks, and has been getting closer to agreement with Be, with Apple said to have doubled its offer to $200m and Be to have cut its $400m asking price to $300m. Although some work has been done on a NeXTstep implementation for PowerPC, there isn’t one currently available, and Solaris on PowerPC is little more than a fading gleam, which suggests that Apple is now far from totally committed to PowerPC.
