[cap-talk] PalmOS and capabilities. Previously: What sparked interest in capabilities - Charlie

[Trey Boudreau]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 07:59:44PM -0800, Charles Landau wrote:
> 
> In 2001, while that system was under development, Palm bought Be Inc, 
> and acquired, along with BeOS, a few dozen engineers and managers. 
>
Palm actually bought the BeOS source tree and hired the engineers.  Be,
Inc. continued to exist to "hold the bag" until the lawyers could wrap
up a couple of details (a suit against Microsoft amongst them).

> The good news is that the engineers liked capabilities.
>
Some of us more than others :-)  I remember meeting Charile at Palm
(prior to the Palm/PalmSource split), and had high hopes.

> The bad news is that the managers had a completely different model of
> management, that did not give engineers the freedom to design. As a
> result, many of the senior engineers, including I, left. I believe the
> new OS was shipped after I left.
> 
We finally completed the capability-based PalmOS 6, whereupon management
killed it.  It never shipped in a real device.  I ported the capability
sub-system to Linux 2.6 as a driver (which we made available,
temporarily, on the net at openbinder.org), only to have managment sell
the company to ACCESS where they finally killed any notion of
capabilites.  I finally took the hint and left.

-- Trey