Welcome to the Wednesday News Roundup. This week marks the first Roundup shared with our new friends over at webOSroundup. This week the big story is Palm’s new legal woes. After that, we’ll cover some news for webOS developers. Lastly, we’ll cover the good news in the Roundup.
Troubled Waters for Palm
Legally speaking, it was a rough week for Palm: Palm received notice of two pending lawsuits. The first was filed by Artifex Software, a California based company that develops, among other things, muPDF, which Palm used in developing the PDF reader application included with webOS. Artifex claims that Palm included their muPDF software without either purchasing a commercial license or complying with the terms of the GPL. There is no indication that Artifex has approached Palm regarding this. Palm acknowledges using the muPDF and has even made available the changes they have made to that and other Open Source projects. The crux of the problem seems to be that Palm did not make their entire PDF application source available online. Depending on how Palm is using the muPDF software Artifex may be correct that Palm has not fully complied with the GPL. However, it seems like this is likely an oversight on Palm’s part and a strong-arm tactic on Artifex’s part. Artifex is no doubt hoping to get some headlines and possibly coerce Palm into a commercial license. Palm will not likely be able publicly to respond given that the suit has been filed.
Perhaps more troubling is the lawsuit seeking class-action status against Palm and Sprint over the recent loss of information stored in users’ Palm Profiles. If you haven’t heard about it there is some information in this PreCentral article. In short, Palm does not keep multiple backups of information backed up to the cloud. If the data on the phone becomes corrupted or the phone did not back up properly the data may be lost when replacing phones or upgrading the operating system. For those who are concerned about data loss we recommend looking to third-party solutions for local backup, such as The Missing Sync (PC or Mac) or Chapura PocketMirror (PC only).
Although the data loss has apparently only affected a small number of people it can be devastating to lose any information. Hopefully this push Palm towards developing a more robust system for protecting data stored on webOS devices. We also hope it won’t unnecessarily line lawyers’ pockets.
Developers, Developers… You get the idea
Two stories from the past week bode well for webOS developers. First, mobile ad company AdMob (recently acquired by Google) has released an open-source SDK for webOS developers who want to use the AdMob network. AdMob is one of the largest players in the mobile ad space. This will allow developers to more easily integrate ads, which should translate into more free applications (or, ad-supported trial versions of paid applications) in the App Catalog. Second, mobile application development tool PhoneGap announced support for webOS. PhoneGap is a cross-platform tool that leverages Web technologies (much like Mojo development itself) to create native apps for multiple devices. This should lead even more developers to look at webOS as a platform for distributing applications.
Roundup
PC Magazine (They still print magazines? Who knew?) selected the Palm Pre as the most innovative new platform in their list of Best Tech Products of 2009. It’s not surprising then, that Ellen DeGeneres gave away the webOS based Palm Pixi with the tech bundle she gave out on the first day of her 12 Days of Giveaways (see the video below). Finally, if you’re interested in setting up Google Voice, PreCentral has an excellent article on setting up visual voicemail with webOS using the service. Did you hear about something we didn’t cover? Have some comments? Sound off in the comments below or hop over to our twitter feed.
Ironically, I think PC Mag is online only nowadays…