An open letter to the Palm OS community: Second, we intend to increase the rate of innovation in Palm OS, and the range of potential licensees, by making it available on Linux. The Palm OS user interface and the PalmSource PIM applications you know will remain, as well as the advanced features that we’ve built into Palm OS� Cobalt’s software frameworks. Properly written Palm OS applications will also be able to run on Palm OS for Linux.
We’re making this change for several reasons:
Linux is intensely popular among electronics companies, especially in Asia, which is becoming the center of mobile device manufacturing. We think providing a Palm OS� solution for Linux can help bring in more licensees.
* The rate of innovation in Linux is faster than anything a proprietary operating system company can do on its own; in the future, we think getting things like device drivers and support for new chips and components will be much easier. This change won’t be directly visible to Palm OS users, but over time we think it should mean faster development of new types of devices.
* Providing solutions for Linux will allow our engineers to focus on improving the Palm OS interface, PalmSource� PIM applications, and advanced software frameworks — exactly the sort of user-visible innovation that many of you have been asking us for.
* Many corporations broadly deploy Linux on servers. Palm OS for Linux will let companies leverage that investment to support and deploy Palm Powered products to their employees.Overall, by teaming up with the Linux community, we think we can build a mobile alliance with the scale and resources to compete globally against even the biggest mobile operating system companies.
This is good news, folks. Keep in mind that the PalmOS UI and applications aren’t going anywhere. You next Palm won’t look like KDE. But by moving the microkernal to an open source project with Linux’s development base, hardware support is going to get a lot better very quickly.
Thoughts on this? Join the discussion in our Google Group.
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