I'm not sure if anyone here had the opportunity to own a PC at any time which ran BeOS, but Haiku OS is sure doing a good job picking up where BeOS left off. POSIX compatibility, clean and consistent programming API's for most everything, the beginnings of a package management system, and soon a modern webkit port for their WebPositive web browser.

Hardware compatibility currently leaves much to be desired, though, in my experience. I've never failed to make it to a desktop in Haiku so far, but I've seen instances where I can't even bring my ethernet interface up. Graphics support only extends as far as the Haiku developers have written drivers for their operating system since there really is no proprietary support save for older BeOS software.

Overall I believe this could be a positive step forward for the OSS community where consistency and quality of software tends to vary wildly, and the most stable of Linux distros must yield to unstable platforms which makes maintainability of any software a difficult task.

What do you guys think? If you haven't seen Haiku OS before, you can check their website out here.