YellowTAB
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Defunct | 2006 |
| Fate | Declared insolvency and discontinued operations |
| Headquarters | Mannheim , Germany |
| Products | yellowTAB ZETA (operating system) |
yellowTAB was a software company headquartered in Mannheim, Germany, known for creating the operating system "yellowTAB ZETA", which was derived from BeOS version 5.1.0. The firm never officially disclosed any licensing arrangement with BeOS proprietor PalmSource. After declaring insolvency in 2006, yellowTAB discontinued its operations. ACCESS, Inc., the entity that acquired the BeOS source code, later asserted that no license authorized yellowTAB’s utilization of the code, labeling ZETA as an unauthorized copy.
After yellowTAB's dissolution, the rights to the OS were obtained by magnussoft, who sold it under the name "magnussoft ZETA". This transition attracted criticism from the BeOS community because magnussoft did not contribute to the Haiku project or other open source initiatives related to BeOS. Several proprietary features originally developed by yellowTAB, including their SVG support for OpenTracker, were independently replicated by open source contributors. Nonetheless, yellowTAB’s activities did not infringe upon the BSD or MIT terms that govern most BeOS-related open source projects.
In March 2006, yellowTAB provided their "Intel Extreme" graphics driver to Haiku developers for collaborative enhancement and integration, although this contribution has not yet been incorporated into Haiku’s main codebase.
By April 2006, yellowTAB entered insolvency protection proceedings amid disputes from employees challenging the validity of this filing. Following this development, responsibility for ZETA’s maintenance and development was handed over to a third-party company, magnussoft.