PalmSource surprised the mobile supplier community
yesterday by announcing it would acquire China MobileSoft
to leverage the Chinese company's expertise in building a mobile
version of the Linux operating system.
PalmSource said it would issue shares in exchange for the
outstanding equity and rights to acquire equity in the
company.
David Nagel, president and CEO of PalmSource, said the
acquisition would give PalmSource a large foothold in the growing
Chinese market for mobile devices and content.
PalmSource will re-create its user interface, software
development frameworks based on the Palm OS and BeOS, and
applications on top of an open distribution of the Linux
kernel.
The applications will run in a proprietary software layer above
the OS, according to Michael Mace, chief competitive officer, who
confirmed that China MobileSoft was developing a version of Linux
for mobile devices. "We intend our layer to be portable to other
implementations of Linux," he said.
The Linux-based OS will not replace the current Cobalt or Garnet
operating systems used today. But as well as opening up
increasingly Linux-friendly markets such as China, the open-source
OS will give the company a huge base of developers as it pushes its
products globally. Thousands of device drivers are already
available for Linux.
"Most companies do their initial testing of new hardware
components on Linux first," said Mace. "So if we offer a
Linux-compatible version of the OS, it should be easier for
licensees to adopt components because testing has been done."
Application compatibility between the two operating systems is
being addressed by a set of APIs dubbed Protein. If a developer
writes to the Protein APIs, an application will run on both Cobalt
and a future Linux OS.
If a developer wants to write to the older 68000 processor
devices, PalmSource will offer an emulation layer similar to the
one used now to run older applications on the Cobalt- and
Garnet-based mobile devices.
Mace said he could not say when licensees would ship products
with the PalmSource Linux OS.
Ephraim Schwartz writes for InfoWorld