> Is this sort of idiocy representative of Palm's attitude?
Some of the representatives, yes. There are some people within Palm
(if they still have jobs after this week's layoffs) that agree with us, and
some who believe we are "subverting profit" which should be going to Palm
for software and tools.
> It really amazes me - I've owned 3 different Palm handhelds, and would
> not have bought any of them without the Linux support provided by
> pilot-link.
I can name a handful of companies who share this view that open
source alternatives are either diverting their own profit, or are in some
way prosecutable:
Kodak
AvantGo
Vindigo
Palm
Sony (and not just the handheld division)
..and others.
I have dealt with each of the above companies on a very personal
level for a few years, with an effort to re-educate them about what we're
doing, why we're doing what we do, and how this is not harmful to their
market. How can this be harmful to a complete sect of the industry they have
all left untouched? If I was making a Windows alternative to the Palm
Desktop and distributing it for free, their argument holds some water. None
of the above companies supports Linux or Unix or OS/2 (officially), so they
should have no argument with what we're doing. We're supporting our
community, and they are supporting theirs.
OT: Macromedia is right across the hall from my former place of
work, and I talked to one of their lead developers at the bar a block from
work one day. I asked him why Macromedia didn't have a Linux or Unix
alternative "Director" type of product, or a proper Shockwave plugin for
Linux. His response was that Linux was "free", and you can't give something
away and make money on it. "Macromedia would die if we made Director for
Linux and gave it away for free...".
It's this exact mindset that drives lawsuits and threats.
> Are they really so stupid that they can't see what you're doing adds
> value to their platform??
They believe we are "taking", not "giving" to them. I have contended
that if there was no pilot-link, ColdSync, JPilot, and others for people
using OS/2, Unix, BSD, Linux... a market Palm completely ignores, that
people would not buy the devices, and would go buy an iPAQ or other device
instead.
How much have Palm's sales gone up by the thousands of non-Windows
Palm users who have purchased one or more Palm devices because they know
they work with their "unsupported" platform? What if that just stopped,
whole-hog, in one month, and no more Palm devices were purchased by that
community? Is it 10%? 5%? I'm sure a 10% loss of sales to Palm right now
would be pretty dramatic to their bottom line.
I have done, and will continue to do my part with re-education of
these companies, by representing the community we support, at their
conferences, their seminars, their shows, and helping them where I can by
providing a platform of support for a place they lack.
I wonder what they're doing with OSX though.. rumor is that CW works
on it, and there's a carbonized post linker also. Dave Fedor from Palm's
response to the Palm Desktop/CW support on OSX was less enthusiastic:
[...]
>Constructor, unfortunately, has not been Carbonized. But I gave up
> on it a long time ago ;-)
We keep trying to give up on it, but it has an amazing will to
live... there is an untested, internal version which is carbonized
and the engineer in question claims it works fine, but devoting QA
resources to it doesn't make sense in the bigger picture. Would
people be interested in using a "thrill seekers only" carbonized
version, understanding that it won't ever be tested or completed?
(Email me directly in response, unless you've comments the group
would want to hear too.)
-David Fedor
Palm, Inc.
[..]
I'd love to see if I can "contract" out the role of whipping up a
Java-based Palm Desktop clone for us to use, something that models what they
have almost perfectly, but more portable (well, as portable as Java can be),
but something polished, something clean, something ours, and something Free.
Any takers? There's Monoplato and some other offerings, but they all
need to be tied together. Right now, people see us as a collection of random
hackers, with no vision. I contend that for a "collection of random
hackers", we're doing pretty damn good for ourselves without any official
support and in our spare time.
Right now, I believe we need a common storage format for desktop
Palm data. We're very close now and we've talked about this here before.
I've suggested XML, only because it seems like a logical fit for what we're
doing and some work already exists in this space, if we can properly handle
all of the exceptions of it's use, including internationlization and DTDs
and parsers. With something like that in place (or CSV or whatever), doing
what we want with that data from there will be easy. Right now, we have too
many different types of data being used on the (unix/OS2) desktop. If we
unify that, agree on a common storage format, we appear with a "unified
face" to these companies. Perhaps companies like Palm don't help us because
they don't know who to point to, where to focus effort. Let's help them with
that.
Throughout all of the history of things myself and others have dealt
with with Palm and partners, I still use the devices, I still buy them when
they're new or interesting or compelling, because I believe in their use,
their simplicity, and because I can support them. They are useful where I
need them to be useful.
I'm not about to give up on them yet... even if they give up on us.
/d
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