Be Inc has persuaded Motorola Inc to offer the BeOS operating system alongside Mac OS on the Macintosh-compatible computers it builds, the New York Times reported. The paper says that Be is close to a similar pact with IBM Corp, except that Mac clones from IBM are not exactly very visible. The only ones that have been acknowledged are the ones it built under contract for Radius Inc, but when it realized it had taken on far more than it could handle, Radius passed that business onto the Taiwanese Mac cloner Umax Computer Corp, and Umax is not likely to want to continue sourcing from IBM something that it could build itself. Be, based in Menlo Park, California originally planned to offer the modern multimedia operating system on its own dual-PowerPC BeBox, but then decided the hardware business was too crowded with people moving into multiprocessor PowerPC machines, and now simply licenses its operating software to anyone with a machine on which it will run.
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