CherryOS, The Final Chapter?

Earlier this week, we canceled our upcoming Maui vacation (and I rushed home early from WinHEC) because we found out that one of our dogs likely has an incurable tumour in his heart. Yesterday, I sent an email to Jim Kartes, president of Maui X-Stream, indicating that we'd therefore need to find some way other than face-to-face to meet and get a review copy of CherryOS to me.

His response was near-immediate and terse: "I have just been notified that Arben is leaving MXS and as a departure settlement he is going to take CherryOS with him. If you have further questions about this you may contact Arben directly at email address deleted." Arben is Arben Kryeziu, the developer of CherryOS, and I suspect this turn of events marks the ultimate demise of the product.

If so, it's a triumph for the open-source movement, although it's a loss for anyone who was tricked into paying money for CherryOS instead of downloading the no-cost PearPC it closely emulated (pun intended). And it begs the question of just what Arben was hoping to accomplish, if indeed it was anything more than a short-term scam. I mean, the evidence was pretty damning that he'd lifted large portions of the GPL'd PearPC code without attribution , recompense and reciprocal rights.