We also don't know which third-party handset vendors have lined up to license ALP in their devices yet. We already know that Motorola is going in its own Linux smartphone direction, so that leaves Samsung, Kyocera, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, Siemens and any number of other small manufacturers up in the air, and so far Blackberry has been pretty hush-hush on anything they're doing in the future, given the litigation mess that they are currently in.

We also don't know what sort of tools and resources will be given to traditional Palm application developers in order to port their applications over to ALP. The GTK+ environment is rich and will be a breath of fresh air to anyone doing Linux GUI development today. It will also be welcome to those who are familiar with tools like the GNU GCC compiler tool set (at http://gcc.gnu.org), Eclipse (at http://www.eclipse.org), and the GTK development libraries (http://www.gtk.org).

Unfortunately, developing in the GTK+ environment would require a considerable learning curve for traditional Palm OS coders to completely redesign their applications to run in the MAX/ALP environment, unless there was some sort of porting tool set available to facilitate the transition. So far, ACCESS and PalmSource haven't yet made those details public.

While we know that the Linux Kernel, GTK+, Eclipse, SQLite and Gstreamer are all open source projects, we don't know what proprietary extensions will be part of the ALP environment. We also don't know whether or not code or intellectual property coming from ACCESS will be released under an Open Source license (GPL? LGPL? Other OSI-compliant license?) or if they will remain proprietary and closed-source.

We would expect that the portions of the OS that relate to the running of legacy Palm OS apps to be closed, as would any number of licensed device drivers and software libraries, such as those having to do with Digital Rights Management. Traditionally, Palm and PalmSource have been highly secretive about system internals and haven't really allowed developers to collaborate in the development process of Palm OS itself.

With a new Linux-based infrastructure, much of that will have to go out the window as ACCESS tries to garner support from both the Open Source development community and its Palm OS cadre. Will they be able to pull it together and open the kimono to the satisfaction of the developers? Only time will tell.

Lessons learned
From December of 2002 through February of 2003, I was Software Developer Liaison for Sharp Electronics' Zaurus. As some of you may recall, the Zaurus was also a Linux PDA, which shared many similarities with the ALP platform, and like ACCESS and PalmSource, the Zaurus was also the product of a Japanese company.

Next week, I'll discuss many of the lessons learned learned from the failed Zaurus product and provide insights into what ACCESS must do to avoid repeating the sad fate of the Zaurus.

Jason Perlow is a long-time contributor to Computing Unplugged and a mobile technology enthusiast. He can be reached via email at jperlow@gmail.com. Jason's food and technology exploits are chronicled on his blog, Off The Broiler, at http://www.offthebroiler.com.