Comment by diskzero
7 hours ago
A strong BeOS selling point was that it was POSIX compliant. I guess that is what you mean by a thin veneer. But we had to write all that code; it wasn’t like we were running Linux or some SCO or other flavor of Unix. It was a written and rewritten and rewritten multiple times.
I am greatly enjoying the juxtaposition of a comment asserting that obviously BeOS was so far from POSIX that Haiku had to do loads of work to get there and your comment that BeOS was POSIX compliant.
Haiku is all new source, so they had to figure out how to get the binaries to run. I am not the POSIX expert, but I think it was just an API guarantee not ABI.
There were several companies that had the BeOS source and that source can be found in the wild. It is speculated that yellowTAB ZETA was based on unlicensed BeOS source code.