This installment in LinuxDevices.com’s “Executive Interview” series explores PalmSource’s plans with respect to morphing Palm OS into a middleware and application stack that runs on top of Linux, with an aim of targeting mobile phones and other wireless-enabled devices. While visiting the company’s annual developers conference in San Jose this week, we sat down with PalmSource VP of Engineering Mike Kelley and Director of Product Marketing John Cook to discuss PalmSource’s Linux strategy and plans. Read the interview here.
Interview with PalmSource exec’s probes elucidates Linux strategy
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Some very valid comments – one has to think, however, what exactly are they up to? I haven’t been able to see any coherent strategy and/or product offering coming out of the palm camp – secrecy aside. Nokia, on the other hand, have been pretty open (in so far as product annoucements etc) how their linux strategy is coming togther.
they are all nuts, consumers don’t care that palm is linux based. they just want a good highly compatible OS that runs on all the cool devices
I’m not sure Nokia was any more transparent with their Linux solution than Palm. Personally (and I could just be ignorant), Nokia’s announcement came out of the blue. Certainly a lot of people in the Gnome camp knew about it (heck, they were collaborating with them), but they certainly did a good job of keeping a close lid on things.
So even though Nokia wasn’t forthright in their plans for Linux, in the end, they did come out with a product. I’m sure they have high hopes for it, but they’re not betting the company on it.
“they are all nuts”
Good start for a comment.
“consumers don’t care that palm is linux based”
Yep and nobody said they did or should, so what’s your point here?
“they just want a good highly compatible OS that runs on all the cool devices”
And it seems like Palm thinks that Linux is giving them exactly that, so again, what’s your point?
This looks like a long awaited opportunity for palmos developpers, they can keep their existing codebase and add/expand as needed.
I hope this will finally drip down to palmone’s HORRIFICLY outdated (os wise) hardware to allow them to cleverly (without much effort as they dont seem to be wanting to put much effort into this) provide some multitasking, memory protectiond and maybe even, god forbid, decent prefetching and caching for devices like the lifedrive.
Propper multitasking and memory protection would be heavenly, can’t tell you how many times pockettunes crashed or the realone player when doing other things and when one app borks, the entire system goes.
I can see it working as multiple little images each running an app.
MAYBE we can FINALLY have a use for those 400+mhz xscales in palmone hardware, because up until now, things have been horribly slow and they would have been better off sticking with 68k.
I’ve used the lifedrive … it’s horrible, it has a harddrive but basicly doesn’t care about it … uses it like solid state memory … except solid state doesn’t spin down …
Anyway, those were my two cents.
Couple years too late for this blarney imo. Where’s the beef?
linux will rule them all.
A company who even have a Linux strategy (except for the distros themselves) must be retarded. The strategy should be about getting money and maybe Linux would be a part of it, but a Linux strategy? Come on….
PalmOS has great strengths and putting Linux in there won’t really help them squat, in fact I think quite the opposite since it’s a serverOS rather than a PalmTop OS. Switches this, switches that, doesn’t matter… it’s still not as competitive as a true Palmtop OS.
I do hope Palm wakes up and realize that Linux really has a very small market (except from servers) and that focusing on a Linux strategy instead of PalmOS strategy will just make them loose even more market share.
You are missing the point.
PalmSource has obviously come to the realization that they do not have the resources to continue development of a full OS. They are a small company without the resources of the Microsofts and Nokias of the world.
By switching to Linux, they are offloading the kernel development, and can concentrate their resources on developing a layer that runs on top of the Linux kernel.
The problem that I see is that it may be too little, too late. If PalmSource had done this a year ago when they still had the largest market share in the PDA market (and it wasn’t yet painfully apparent that Cobalt is a dead duck) they would have looked as innovators and a company with a strategy. Now they just look like a drowning man trying to hang on to some plank to keep afloat.
Well, I’m one of those you don’t care about mobile phones, since the main reason for using one is doing and receiving calls. *Nothing More*. No java games, msn, e-mail and bloat. Just a plain mobile phone.
But the next one I’ll buy will surely run Linux 🙂
You know what I wonder? Will it take 10 minutes to start the phone? It could very well since Linux is so darn bloated and slow.
And apparently Linux can do that, and Palm has failed to accomplish this task on their own so far. Atleast thats what the market is telling them.
LOL, hey can you pass that crack it seems to be some good stuff. Firstly check out LFS, Damn Small Linux, busybox and other great embedded Linux projects. You shouldn’t lump embedded Linux/GNU work into the Redhat/Mandrake Distro centric user viewpoint.
If your distro takes 10 minutes to start I would recommend having more than 4Mb of ram when trying to start KDE <-;
Linux normaly takes about 90 seconds to start on my P3 @ 600mhz with 384MB of ram with all kinds of services that I do not need. Palm would only include the modules they need for that phone model making the initial boot 10 seconds or so and starting back from standby very quick. What you are saying…
Lets have Wimdows XP Pro installed on the phone and watch it fly.