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3Com Sues over DaVinci
poetbill writes "Palm Computing has obtained a preliminary injunction prohibiting Royal from selling its rival DaVinci handheld device, which 3Com claims was copied from the Palm operating system." Does this remind anyone of a similar case from a few years back?
I see the link is broke, so it's also covered here:
http://mu.current.nu
and at
http://www.pdabuzz.com
Palm is trying to keep their stuff proprietary, just like Microsoft does....
Whoa there. ``Keeping [code] proprietary'' is not the same as ``rejecting standards''. Just because 3Com doesn't want daVinci to dupe their code, doesn't mean that 3Com is actively opposing clones that do similar things with similar interfaces. The claim 3Com is making is that ``portions of the copyrighted Palm OS operating system software were copied verbatim in the daVinci products, in violation of the United States copyright laws'' (from the press release), and that's just not cool (assuming it's true, which of course is yet to be proven). Don't try to co-opt this into a big-bad-monopoly argument....
``This, too, shall pass.'' ---Eastern proverb
I don't see why Palm is bothering. I have a daVinci, and trust me, it's no winner. Actually, it sucks. I can never sync. Not a lot of software, and what software there is sucks. Can't sync. Handwriting recognition has trouble telling the difference between "b" and "d", and "f" only works right about 1/2 the time. Can't sync. No support for repeating events. Can't sync. Single-tone alarm that keeps beeping for 1 minute, then stops instead of going off for five minutes, then beeping again. Can't sync.
I wouldn't be surprised if the daVinci OS was copied from Palm's. Royal doesn't seem to know very much about it, and Palm asm compilers work fine - you just have to strip some bytes of the beginning of the binary to get it to work.
Frankly, I expect the daVinci to be dead within a year or two. At $99, they can't be making much of a profit off it, and support for it ROYALLY [sic] sucks.
-Ender Stonebender
(And did I mention I can't get the damn to synchronize with my PC?)
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Then why not buy a Palm? Of course you'd be paying premium for it, because currently there are no real competitors. A used one could prolly be had for less than $200, and one of those Palm IIIe are $229 new, right? I really hope more Palm work-alikes come out, and at lower price points.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*