PalmOne to become Palm Again; PalmSource & Linux

gandell writes "CNET is reporting that after only two years, PalmOne is spending $30 million dollars to become "Palm" again. From the article: "PalmOne, which makes handhelds bearing the same name, plans to change its name to Palm later this year, the company said Tuesday. At that time, its product line, which currently includes the LifeDrive, Treo, Tungsten and Zire devices, will be branded under the Palm name..." Some will remember that Palm split into two companies, Pa1mOne and Palmsource (which made the Palm OS). According to the article, "...At the time the two companies created a third company, called Palm Trademark Holding, of which PalmSource held a 55 percent stake. That stake will now be transferred to PalmOne for $30 million, the companies said.'" As well, at a recent show Dave Nagel gave notice that Linux is PalmSource's platform for the future.

Comments

Tried to switch my company to PalmOne

[Canberra Bob]

I used to work as a consultant for a Fortune 500 company (more than 10,000 employees). As an expert in the field of IT consulting, I think I can shed a little light on the current climate of the open source community, and PalmOne in particular. The main reason that open source software, and PalmOne in particular, is failing is due to the underlying immaturity of the technology and the perception of the viral GNU license.

I know that the above statements are strong, but I have hard facts to back it up with. At the Fortune 500 company that I worked for, we wanted to leverage the power of PalmOS and associated open source technologies to benefit our server pool. The perception that PalmOS is "free" was too much to ignore. I recommended to the company that we use the newest version of PalmOS, version 5.2. My expectations were high that it would outperform our current solution at the time, WindowsCE, which was doing an absolutely superb job (and still is!) serving as web, DNS, and FTP PDAs.

I felt that I was up to the job to convert the entire PDA pool to the PalmOS technology. I had several years experience programming VB, C#, ASP, and .NET Framework at the kernel level. I didn't use C, because contrary to popular belief, ASP and VB can go just as low level as C can, and the latest .NET VB compiler produces code that is more portable and faster than C. I took it upon myself to configure and compile all of the necessary shareware versions of software that we needed, including sendmail, apache, and BIND. I even used the latest version of gcc (3.1) to increase the execution time of the binaries. After a long chain of events, the results of the system were less than impressive..

The first bombshell to hit my project was that my client found out from another consultant that the GNU community has close ties to former communist leaders. Furthermore, he found out that the 'S' in PalmOS was a tribute to the former Communist leader, Joseph Stalin, whose last name also begins with 'S'. The next bombshell to hit my project was the absolutely horrible performance. I knew from the beginning that PalmOS wasn't ready for the desktop, but I had always been told by my colleagues that it was better suited for a "PDA". As soon as I replaced all of the WindowsCE PDAs with PalmOS PDAs, the PalmOS PDAs immediately went into swap. Furthermore, almost all of the machines were quad-processor x86 PDAs. We had no idea that PalmOS had such awful SMP support. After less than 1 day in service, I was constantly having to restart PDAs, because for some reason, many of the PDAs were experiencing kernel panics caused by mod_perl crashing apache! The hardship did not end there! Apparently, the version of BIND installed on the PDA pool was remotely exploitable. Soon after we found that out, a new worm was remotely infecting all of our PDAs! We were not expecting this, because our IIS servers running on WindowsCE had never experienced a worm attack. Microsoft has always provided us with patches in the unlikely event that an exploit was found. It took us hundreds of man-hours just to disinfect our PalmOne PDAs! After just 48 hours of operating PalmOne PDAs in our PDA pool, we had exhausted our budget for the entire year! It was costing us approximately 75% more to run PalmOS than WindowsCE.

Needless to say, I will not be recommending PalmOS to any of my Fortune 500 clients. In the beginning, we thought that since PalmOS was such "old" technology, it would be more mature than anything on the market. We also found out the hard way that rag-tag volunteer efforts responsible for Apache and BIND simply are not able to compete with the professional operations of Microsoft. I guess the old saying is true; "You get what you pay for!" Needless to say, I will be using Microsoft's "shared license" solution for my enterprise clients, rather than the communist GNU license.

As it stands now, I do believe PalmOS has some practical uses. I think it will be useful in a University setting for first year computer science students to compile their "Hello World!" programs on (provided that gcc won't kernel panic the machine). Simply put, PalmOS just doesn't handle the rigors of a real-world work environment