Palm to go Linux

jetkins writes "The Melbourne Age reports that company officials announced Tuesday that Palm will move to a new Linux-based platform 'to help the company compete better.' The move was announced 'during a meeting with analysts in New York, where they also discussed the company's business strategy and refused to talk about recent rumors of a possible buyout.'"

Comments

Re:Are we going to be able to see the source code?

[kestasjk]

That is the price Palm pays for using Free software. That's the price they pay for using GPL'd software. OpenBSD runs on the Zaurus, and even though NetBSD is no longer more portable than Linux Palm could certainly go with a BSD instead of Linux if they wanted to keep their IP to themselves.
However they probably decided using Linux would create a buzz, and they may be right; I can't remember the last time I heard Palm mentioned in news.

Re:Handhelds and PDF?

[drinkypoo]

I have never owned a handheld or even touched one, but would like to know whether a basic handled to be used to read PDF documents downloaded from the internet is reasonable.

Get a Windows Mobile PDA with WiFi and support for modern SD cards, and a VGA-resolution display, and you will have no problems. The QVGA (240x320) screen is pretty bad, although IIRC Adobe Reader for mobile devices has cleartype. It's one of the largest apps on my iPaq.