Access’s Access Linux Platform has been considered the official successor to the Palm OS for a long time – but nobody ever was sure if Palm(the hardware guys) would adopt ALP. Now, Ed Colligan spoke out…and announced that Palm will deploy an own Linux platform.
Essentially, the platform is said to be “compatible with Garnet”; Palm plans to “evolve” its developers from Garnet to Linux. The platform will not be licensed to other companies – so everyone developing for this platform puts all his eggs in the Palm basket…
IMHO, this announcement marks the final departure and breakup between PalmSource/Access and Palm(the hardware company). The two companies have drifted away from one another since the spin off; and Palm has now “cut off” all bonds to its former software department.
As for developer motivation; Palm’s decision to not license the platform is a very bad idea IMHO. Having more than one hardware manufacturer makes development more “secure” as you are less dependent on the date of a single company…
The PalmInfoCenter has the full scoop:
http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9351/palm-announces-new-linux-based-mobile-platform/
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Uuuiii! That is kind of bad news I would say and a bit like back to the past…now palm starts doing everything itself again Hardware & Software -why did they split in the first place??!!
It will be interesting to see whether access linux or palm-linux will be more successful. Perhaps palm aims more for american (north and south) and maybe European markets while access-linux will take asian markets. In any case, this whole thing will create loads of confusion and what I ask myself is: will apps for access-linux run on palm-linux?! AAAHHHH, it seems they are trying hard to drive people to windows… . My TH55 is still working fine- I just hope it will never break, but if it does in the near future, I guess I´ll go for a windows PDA, there is just too much confusion and instability and un-predictability with palm and access…
good news. i hope they will make it such way that it will be as garnet compatible as possible (if few special hacks and applications will not work i don’t care) and it will be possible to write applications in some linux native api as well. prefereably such way that it will be simple to port applications. and i hope they will FINALLY support unicode…this is major thing i miss in palmos, currently its pain to make software which support locales well