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You're missing the point by referring to ALP as the successor to Palm OS. It's nothing of the sort. It's a Linux variant for use on low-cost smartish phones in China. That's it. Access, a Japanese company, bought PalmSource to get ChinaMobileSoft. By using an American company as an intermediary, this allowed them a back door into the Chinese market, which otherwise wouldn't have been accessible to a Japanese company for political reasons. Palm OS has nothing to do with any of this, and it never will.
This is why Access was okay with such a blanket source code license to Palm for Garnet. They're not using it anyway and don't care about it either way.
Palm, on the other hand, is working on the successor to Garnet, if for no other reason than to give them an alternative to becoming just Yet Another WinMob OEM. They've been hiring Linux developers for years, and the full source license on Garnet allows them the ability to include seamless Garnet backwards compatability in the new OS. I've wondered if the new Palm OS is much more, in fact, than a Linux kernal juggling multiple Garnet virtual machines.
In short, though, the company to watch here is Palm. Unless you care about low cost Chinese feature phones, Access is irrelevant.
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