Wednesday, December 8, 2004
PalmSource Buys Linux-Based Mobile Phone Company, To Port PalmOS To Linux?
Posted by Janak Parekh in "THE COMPETITION" @ 10:00 AM
"PalmSource, Inc., provider of Palm OS®, a leading operating system powering next generation mobile devices and smartphones today announced entry into an agreement for the acquisition of China MobileSoft Limited (CMS), a leading Chinese mobile phone software company with business operations headquartered with its wholly-owned subsidiary, MobileSoft Technology (Nanjing), in China...PalmSource will continue to offer both Palm OS® Garnet and Palm OS® Cobalt to support a broad range of mobile devices including smartphones. PalmSource also plans to implement Palm OS on top of Linux, bringing the benefits of Palm OS to the Linux community, including the award winning user interface, software frameworks based on the best of Palm OS and BeOS®, a large base of professional and consumer applications, and an enthusiastic community of more than 25 million users and over 360,000 registered developers."
I'm personally a fan of Linux -- I use it daily in my work and research. But this press release smacks of tossing it around as a buzzword. It's no panacea, and it's no trivial thing to take an OS like Palm OS and run it "on top of Linux" -- it's not just running about running "make" as the PR implies. Finally, I'm not sure how they're going to reconcile this with the rich, robust kernel they already have from BeOS. If anything, this smacks me as a lack of focus, which in my opinion is the last thing PalmSource can afford right now; as it stands, there's no Cobalt devices out the door yet.
Update: PalmSource has posted a letter to the community. In short, "Palm OS For Linux" will be the next version after Cobalt, and both Garnet and Cobalt will continue to be sold alongside it. I still disagree with that principle, and I think it'll lead to confusion, but we'll see.
I'm personally a fan of Linux -- I use it daily in my work and research. But this press release smacks of tossing it around as a buzzword. It's no panacea, and it's no trivial thing to take an OS like Palm OS and run it "on top of Linux" -- it's not just running about running "make" as the PR implies. Finally, I'm not sure how they're going to reconcile this with the rich, robust kernel they already have from BeOS. If anything, this smacks me as a lack of focus, which in my opinion is the last thing PalmSource can afford right now; as it stands, there's no Cobalt devices out the door yet.
Update: PalmSource has posted a letter to the community. In short, "Palm OS For Linux" will be the next version after Cobalt, and both Garnet and Cobalt will continue to be sold alongside it. I still disagree with that principle, and I think it'll lead to confusion, but we'll see.
