This strategy will enable us to reach hundreds of thousands, or even millions of new users quickly and cheaply. Be is going to take a huge revenue hit on this, up front at least. But while investors seem to see negative numbers in the prospect, I see it as a simple marketing expense. In exchange, Be will see a level of exposure they haven't enjoyed since the days when BeOS for PowerPC was available as a free download. But with the x86 market being ten times larger than the PowerPC market, and the public now better primed to understand the concept of multi-boot computing, Be and BeOS developers are about to see an influx of new users the likes of which they've never witnessed.
People are funny.
By distributing BeOS for free, Be overcomes this odd fear of spending a nominal sum for a great piece of software. FreeBe will be absent a few royalty-bearing technologies, such as the Real Player, the Opera browser, and some codecs. However, it will still be possible to purchase the full version of BeOS in a box with manuals, for installation into a real partition. Whether, how, and how far any possible open source initiative from Be will go remains to be seen. For now, BeOS will be free as in beer, not as in speech.