This week Palm launched the company’s open source portal opensource.palm.com, containing the modified Linux packages for the webOS mobile operating system. In a blog post Palm talks about what open source software (OSS) means to the company:
We’re using Linux and various other open source software in webOS to allow us to accelerate innovation through collaboration with the global community of open source developers.
The benefits of teaming with the open source community come with the important responsibility of ensuring compliance with applicable open source license obligations. For that, we have established a compliance program including:
- Enforcing open source compliance policy, processes and license obligations;
- Establishing an internal team to oversee open source compliance;
- Using a range of commercial and Palm-developed tools to help with the compliance activities including a compliance project management tool, an open source software inventory tool, a code scanning tool, a linkage analysis tool; and
- Establishing open source internal training to continue to raise awareness and reinforce open source compliance within Palm.
While it’s a good move to see Palm build up the open source portal, many fans of the devices and mobile application developers are concerned by the delay of the release date for a Palm Mojo Framework SDK, as you can tell by the comments to the latest blog post on the SDK. It’s still not clear when the Palm Pre will be available in the European market, but it’s definitely one of the most exciting mobile devices in the market right now.
It took Apple initially longer than expected to come out with a publicly available SDK, and still they managed to turn iPhone application development into a global success story. The difference with Palm Pre and the Palm Mojo Framework is, that the competition is much tougher now, with Google’s Android based systems leading the attack on Apple.
