Googles Android and ALP

Good news (BBC NEWS | Technology | Q&A: Googles Android.) I’m relieved that the rumours of a Google Phone (GPhone), were not true. This initiative is much more beneficial to the market and end-users in the long run.

Open Source/Linux has been on mobile handsets for a while, but no great successes yet. Hopefully this alliance can help push free software into the middle of where things are happening. Once an open source product has feature parity with existing mainstream products, this will fuel market acceptance, which can then unleash further creativity of open source developers. A great example of this transition is what happened with Mozilla’s Firefox.

I’m surprised that other Linux Mobile firms did not get on the bandwagon. It might make sense for ACCESS (owner of PalmSource) to join the club, as the have GNU/Linux based Mobile Operating System ALP (ACCESS Linux Platform.) We’ve been hearing about ALP for the past few years, yet I haven’t seen show up on any phones.  Since PalmOne/Palm Inc. doesn’t seem to want it (See nice Wikipedia page on this,) that might make a good partnership with this alliance.