ACCESS and PalmSource should make sure that plenty of English-speaking people are on-hand in the US to address developer concerns, to directly interact with the community, and make sure that Wind River, the supplier of the ALP SDK, is also able to directly communicate with developers.

One of the biggest problems we had was that the Zaurus platform was a combination of Trolltech's Qt Embedded and Lineo's embedded Linux platform, and the SDK was a bastardized combination of the two that was tailored to the Zaurus's environment.

However, Sharp arranged it so that all Zaurus related development issues went directly through Sharp, and both Lineo and Trolltech essentially had to stick their fingers "up their butts" whenever developers went to them for advanced support issues. The situation eventually became completely untenable.

Availability of the developer toolkit
Finally, there was the issue of the cost of the developer toolkit. While it was free to develop Java applications on the Zaurus, the Qt Embedded/Qtopia developer kit had to be purchased from Trolltech, and originally cost several thousand dollars per seat -- a ridiculous amount for a one-man developer shop, the type of developers where most of the Palm and Windows CE apps came from.

Sure, you could use the Open Source version of the developer kit, but that was only good for building and selling Open Source applications, not ones for commercial sale. Eventually, a $250 1-seat Qt Embedded Zaurus SDK was released, but by that time, it was too late.

Can ACCESS/PalmSource learn?
While it appears much of these problems are moot with GTK+, since its licensed under the GPL, the entire Wind River PCD for Linux toolkit needs to be made available for either free or super-cheap to the ALP developers -- otherwise history is likely to repeat itself.

Additionally, PalmSource needs to be aware that Linux developers like to work with all sorts of Linux APIs and tools (like direct to framebuffer libraries such as SDL for games development) and they should allow them to be used on the ALP platform, including Qt Embedded.

This is why its essential that developers should be able to re-build and repackage the entire ALP environment and produce their own ROM images, such as for vertical use.

Developers are the key to success for any software platform. For ACCESS to succeed, the company will have to do more than give lip service to developer relations. After all, this is an area where Microsoft really "gets it".

Product availability and resources For more information on the Sharp Zaurus, visit http://www.myzaurus.com. For more information on ACCESS, visit http://www.access-us-inc.com. For more information about PalmSource, visit http://www.palmsource.com. For more information on OpenZaurus, visit http://sourceforge.net/projects/openzaurus. For more information on OPIE, visit http://opie.handhelds.org. For more information on Familiar, visit http://familiar.handhelds.org. For more information on Trolltech, visit http://www.trolltech.com. For more information on Lineo, visit http://www.freescale.com. For more information about WindRiver, visit http://www.windriver.com. For more information on GTK+, visit http://www.gtk.org.