Through a Facebook retro group, I stumbled upon this video
Resucité BeOS 4.0 a partir del código fuente de los 90, ¡y sí que arranca! (Con enlace a GitHub)
And the following github repo:
BeOS4-Ressurected/original-source/servers at main · chronic8000/BeOS4-Ressurected · GitHub
I am not following that closely what is happening, I was not aware that source code being anytime released, did I miss something? or a new type of AI fake?
That being said take precautions going through that source code
This should be BeOS 5.1d, if we’re talking about 2001, not BeOS 4, which was released much earlier. Well, the code for that has definitely been leaked for a while now. Someone put it on GitHub…
Wouldn’t they still have to worry about copyright issues like what happened to zeta Even if this was 100% legitimate, I could be wrong, but that’s what happened from my understanding
Well, let’s see if the owners of the BeOS code will show up and what they’ll do with it… but I wonder if they still care about that old code. Of course, it would be good to have some kind of license for that code…
…and, of course, now the AI will train on that code! maybe it will be able to bake BeOS apps… or at least give some good advice.
I hope they turn a blind eye to this, but I’m sure some company that owns or bought the copyright is going to jump out of the bushes and give someone a slap on the wrist, that’s what usually happens to this sort of thing
You can even find leaked Windows source code hosted on GitHub in several places, and Microsoft (who owns GitHub) doesn’t care anymore.
You do have a point in fact I think there’s some source code of ms-dos floating around there I think there’s one guy that made in OS based off of that called freedos or svardos
All the readme.md stuff there is AI slop.
The youtube video is AI slop, showing someones CS101 “kernel” booting and claiming to be BeOS 4.
The “original source” directory contains files from the 2001 source code leak, and that, again, is not actually BeOS 4.0; it’s heavily corrupted and from the BeIA era; and is basically the userland + some drivers; no kernel.
Someone reorganized the dano code and changed it to BeOS 4.0, it still has the ‘dano’ code name in a file I looked at. So unless Be used ‘dano’ as a code name in older builds this is 5.1. If I remember correctly you needed a build machine to compile and I am not sure anyone ever did get it working, might even have some malicious code added. Stay away for numerous reasons.
As someone who does use AI for development quite a bit, I feel confident in saying that README.md is AI generated, which means it’s probably done the work to port/fix/refactor (I’ve not looked at what was done) the code here.
Even the title at the top:
Successfully resurrected BeOS 4.0 from original source code!
Is exactly the kind out output I see from Claude Code after I finish work and ask it to document what’s been done. It loves emojis and checklists.
Totally legit obviously cough
This is the ever so ubiquitous and horribly corrupt source leak. No one can get it to compile because is has a load of code missing and garbled.
Could AI fix and supplement the missing code? Maybe someone has tried to do that,… but most likely such code would not work anyway, the amount of code is too large and too complex for AI to handle, and it would probably require the intervention of a knowledgeable human (at every step).
Even if it could, what would be the point? If someone wants to run Dano there’s a binary version of it. If someone wants to use a modern version of BeOS there’s Haiku.
The point is? There are many people, and even more goals and ways to achieve them. There will definitely be someone who will find this a very interesting and inspiring activity.
No, because the code isn’t there for the copyright-violation-bot to spew back out.
And that’s not how AI works.
To see another distro based off of BeOS or haiku would be interesting to see I do have to admit, but do we really want to go down that road or open that door especially if people start making distros that are a buggy mess slapped together with AI “horror music starts playing in the background” 
What do you expect from a partial code drop of BeIA and some AI hacks on top? That would have neither historical interest (for that you want unmodified code, or maybe very carefully minimally modified in reversible way, as in art restoration work); nor will it have the practical interest of bringing BeOS ideas to the modern world as Haiku does.
Can it run old BeOS binaries?