Reading page 21 reveals a few important details. Palm, Inc. will continue to license the Palm OS from ACCESS/PalmSource until December 2, 2009. If you have read some of the early news posts on this report, you may have incorrectly read that Palm’s license of Palm OS ends on December 2, 2006. This is simply not true. What really happens on December 2 of this year is that Palm makes a license payment to ACCESS. Per the terms of the license agreement that was reached last year, Palm is relieved “of [their] obligation to make minimum royalty payments under the license agreement after calendar year 2006.” Palm still gets to use Palm OS 5/Garnet until December 2009 and with the information we have on hand, gets to use Garnet essentially free for the years 2007 – 2009. Further, Palm is currently “in negotiations with PalmSource to expand our development and distribution rights to the current version of the Palm OS.” I want to be clear about this: Palm is still going to release new products, and some of those new products will continue to use Palm OS 5/Garnet. This is not only stated in the 10-K report, but also by Jim Christianson, Palm’s Director of Product Communications, in a statement he made to PalmAddict. Additionally, we know that Palm has recently appointed Bill Coleman to its board of directors. Mr. Coleman was the vice present of system software for Sun Microsystems. You can read the entire Palm press release here.
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From http://www.1src.com/scripts/show/1642-Palm__PalmSource__and_Palm_OS_Linux.html:
Reading page 21 reveals a few important details. Palm, Inc. will continue to license the Palm OS from ACCESS/PalmSource until December 2, 2009. If you have read some of the early news posts on this report, you may have incorrectly read that Palm’s license of Palm OS ends on December 2, 2006. This is simply not true. What really happens on December 2 of this year is that Palm makes a license payment to ACCESS. Per the terms of the license agreement that was reached last year, Palm is relieved “of [their] obligation to make minimum royalty payments under the license agreement after calendar year 2006.” Palm still gets to use Palm OS 5/Garnet until December 2009 and with the information we have on hand, gets to use Garnet essentially free for the years 2007 – 2009. Further, Palm is currently “in negotiations with PalmSource to expand our development and distribution rights to the current version of the Palm OS.” I want to be clear about this: Palm is still going to release new products, and some of those new products will continue to use Palm OS 5/Garnet. This is not only stated in the 10-K report, but also by Jim Christianson, Palm’s Director of Product Communications, in a statement he made to PalmAddict. Additionally, we know that Palm has recently appointed Bill Coleman to its board of directors. Mr. Coleman was the vice present of system software for Sun Microsystems. You can read the entire Palm press release here.