Everyone that has been following the BeOS/Haiku/Zeta related news for the past few years knew that this was about to happen sooner rather than later. The Zeta project is now officially dead.

To quote myself “I predict that we will see the death of Zeta in a not to distant future.”, this was my conclusion in a story written just over a week ago. And yesterday Bernd Korz, head of Zeta’s development team announced on his blog that he will cease all development in Zeta, this in turn effectively means that the project is dead and that Zeta will no longer be in development.

Bernd Korz been the head of the development team since the projects start seven years ago, much has been done during those seven years, but not nearly enough to keep up with Zeta’s rival in the BeOS scene, Haiku.

Korz already wanted to quit development on Zeta when YellowTab went bust, and Magnussoft took over the rudder one year ago. Now Korz states that he is not sure if and when the service pack to Zeta 1.5 will be released. My take is that it will probably not be released. He also states that he may open source the code he has written since this code is not owned by YellowTab nor Magnussoft.

I don’t think the full Zeta source code will be open sourced, because most of this code is licensed from PalmSource, which in turn acquired the BeOS source when Be Inc. went bust. But we can at least hope that some drivers and applications written by Korz and his team will be open sourced, and that that may give the Haiku project a little boost.