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The goal of the Open Palm Environment is to attempt to resurrect open source programming within the Palm community. There is some remaining evidence of what used to be a thriving community, such as the GCC compiler suite and the projects at PalmOpenSource.com. The size of the open source community hasn't grown with the platform however. This really isn't surprising, given that Palm has neglected their open source developers. The introduction of new inherently network enabled devices provides an opportunity to try to build up that community again. The benefit of having network enabled devices has been quite restricted in my opinion, because users have to rely on commercial developers for new applications. Commercial companies just don't adapt to discontiguous changes very well, but open source projects do. I think that picking up and dusting off some of the old network apps, and adding a few new tools to the mix, could kick off a great community effort. The Palm platform needs network tools in order to reap the full benefit of the new capabilities.
It's really hard to say right off the bat. It would be pretty presumptuous of me to think that I can predict what would happen if we were able to get this community working on a large scale. That's really why I'm hoping that we can get this working. If real innovation starts happening for Palm devices the results could quite possibly be something that I can't even conceive of now.
What I would like to start out with is some open source code for Palm devices. Some of it will be code from older abandoned projects, and hopefully some of it will be new code. Either way, the nexus of developer activity will probably be the sourceforge project page for OPE (Open Palm Environment). I'm hoping that we can generate something more than just code, such as some documentation about how to use the existing tools to work on the Palm platform. But I have no idea if that'll even happen, so I have no plans for how to handle that.
One of the aspects of community building I would like to start experimenting with straight off is using a mobile device targeted site. The best site that I've seen allowing for the creation of content that's available from all sorts of mobile devices is WINKsite. I've already setup a site and started building some content for it. One of the important differentiators of WINKsite is that it allows access and publishing from both mobile devices and desktop systems. The emulator embedded below allows for access to the site using a desktop browser. You can also access the site using a cell phone browser, the WAP browser that comes with the SDIO Bluetooth card for OS4 devices, or NetFront using a Clie or OS5 device. It'll probably work from just about any device, but it might take some tweaking to figure out how to use the site. See below for notes about accessing the site from NetFront.
This is a fully functional version of the Open Palm Environment site, use it here or bring it up on your device:
We've recently added a Wiki page to the list of collaboration mechanisms one can use if they feel interested in the project. The Wiki page currently holds the list of software that should be in the 1.0 version of OPE. Personally, I still agitate a bit for the WINKsite. But I'm highly practical, so we're making available other services so that people can hack in whatever form they feel most comfortable. I'll probably pop in and out of all of them, cross pollinating the ideas as rampantly as time allows.
I'm trying to keep all the user info about the project inside the WINKsite. This allows me to publish info from my handheld, and allows others to access it from their mobile devices. The SourceForge site will probably be used for some developer organization, but in general the info will be provided using the mobile site. It has all sorts of features (blog, chat, guestbook, notes, links, etc), hopefully others will like the site as much as I do. If there is some issue with the site you can contact me at revrendi@users.sourceforge.net.