Earlier we had reported that hackers had successfully cracked into Palm’s WebOS that powers Pre. We predicted unlike Apple, that Palm might be open to such activities. And here we are when we see things getting official.
The Palm Pre’s SDK still isn’t available to the public, and coders are champing at the bit. They’re so eager to program for the Pre that some folks have hacked into their Pres and are beginning to create the same sort of “jailbroken” community we’ve seen for years on the iPhone.
Palm today made their SDK schedule clearer, and sent a surprisingly mild message out to rogue programmers. The SDK will become available “by the end of this summer,” Palm says, and they’ll ramp up their ‘early access program’ as quickly as they can before that.
Instead of slapping hackersdown, Palm is just saying that Mojo-based projects will be better than hacks.
“We recognize that some developers will experiment in ways that cross official boundaries, but we believe that our formal offerings – and community efforts built around those offerings – will provide the best experience for the vast majority of webOS developers and users,” the company says.
That displays an admirably open attitude towards independent developers and hackers that I hope Palm will continue with.
If it had been Apple, they would have stayed silent for a year and then at some point declare it illegal. But seems like Palm is more open ended to the developer community. And why wouldn’t that be, Palm Pre can either save or kill their company.
While other platforms’ apps number in the thousands, I’m pretty sure the Pre still has only a few dozen available.
loading...
loading...