- "Palm has a perpetual license to use as well as to innovate on the Palm OS Garnet code base. Palm will retain ownership rights in its innovations."
- "The new agreement also provides Palm flexibility to use Palm OS Garnet in whole or in part in any Palm product, and together with any other system technologies. The company plans to ensure that applications now compatible with Palm OS Garnet will operate with little or no modification in future Palm products that employ Palm OS Garnet as the company evolves it over time to support Palm's product differentiation strategy."
- "Palm has secured an expansion of its existing patent license from ACCESS to cover all current and future Palm products, regardless of the underlying operating system." (my emphasis)
I like that Palm is framing this agreement in terms of supporting its product differentiation strategy. I know I've been making the argument that these negotiations with ACCESS were critical to its ability to "develop and distribute new products based on a next-generation version of the Palm OS" (Palm's own words) and that that next-gen Palm OS would run on Linux. The emphasized phrase in the last bullet point underscores once again that this is a part of what Palm plans to do and something they sorely wanted from this agreement. But I'm of the mind that there are still lots of interesting and profitable new products that could be developed on a modestly refreshed Palm OS Garnet kernel and framework. I believe we'll see Garnet on future Palm devices in two forms: as a compatibility layer in an advanced multi-tasking OS that Palm themselves are developing, and as a standalone smart device OS similar to what we have today.
Garnet's roots in the original Palm Pilot, a device with miniscule RAM and processor resources, have made it the most performant major mobile operating system on the market today and a paragon of efficiency. The experience using Palm OS on the new Treo 680, for example, is darned good compared to the competition. A lot of the credit goes to Palm for innovating within the limited rights it had on top of the base OS. Not all mobile devices that people will want to use in the coming years will require the advanced OS features that Linux offers. In the short-to-mid term, while mobile Linux is getting the kinks worked out, those features may come with significant overhead that demands faster processors, more memory, and bigger batteries, impacting costs and important design criteria. So there is reason to believe that during that period Palm may be able to better satisfy certain classes of customers with the traditional Palm OS, or an improved version that preserves the current kernel and architecture.
Palm is not a big company and can't risk losing its connected device focus, but I hope we'll see them continue to roll out a nice line-up of handheld computers that stick with the tried and true Palm OS architecture. Palm has regained its dominant position in the still-sizable handheld organizer market and there's still a billion dollar paper planner industry out there for well-designed entry level Palm OS PDAs to whittle into. I think Palm's emphasis on supporting their product differentiation strategy—and the sizable price tag paid for these expanded rights to the Palm OS Garnet source code—are signs that they have much broader plans for the coming years than just being the maker of the Treo.
Unanswered questions about this agreement:
- What about the pieces of the Palm OS that aren't on the device: HotSync Manager and Palm Desktop? I'm not sure, but it doesn't sound like these were included in the agreement.
- Is this agreement a one-time payment that relieves Palm of future royalty payments to ACCESS for its use of Palm OS Garnet? Seems like an obvious question that I'm surprised isn't discussed in either of the press releases or the FAQ published by ACCESS.
- If ACCESS is now OK with the idea of Garnet being used as an execution environment that could potentially run on top of any number of different operating systems, will they consider this as a new business strategy rather than just a one-off agreement with Palm? Might they try to position Palm OS Garnet the way they do the Java environments they sell: a kind of virtual machine that licensees can add to almost any phone platform they might be using? It would be interesting if they did this and tried to turn Garnet into a de facto industry standard execution environment like Sun, QualComm, and Adobe have done with Java, Brew, and Flash. But my guess is this deal is a one-off. ACCESS wants ALP to become an industry standard, not Palm OS. Those are not mutually exclusive options, but there's a difference in emphasis that's important for their marketing.
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