Since I don’t believe that those at the helm at Palm are stupid, I am led to only one conclusion. Palm doesn’t really care about building a viable developer community. That’s because the whole point of this exercise is to make Palm an attractive takeover target. There are two notable companies which are itching to get into this phone-slash-computer game, but they have repeatedly demostrated total ineptitude with respect to consumer electronics. I predict that Microsoft will snap up Palm within the year if Dell doesn’t beat them to it.

Secondly, Palm has done a lot to promote development on the Pre. The CTO is writing a book about it with O’Reilly, for crying out loud. And what do you say to Classic? They could have easily walked away from PalmOS and the old apps, but instead spent a lot of money to develop a PalmOS emulation layer. And an SDK beta? Did Apple hold a closed beta for their SDK? No, they didn’t even murmur about the iPhone until like 2 days before they released it.

Just a bunch of malcontents.

Also, my two cents on the NDA deal. I don’t know what sort of conversations happened between you all and Palm, but based on what I’ve read here I agree that tweeting about it maybe wasn’t the best idea. But I’m not going to beat this horse any further.

It’s not so common or understandable for companies in open software development environments.

It appears that Palm is attempting to transition from one to the other and not everyone got the word and as a corporation they are going through a period of inter-departmental conflict and confusion.

This matters to *you*, but not to my Mom. Why is that important? Because people like my Mom are the ones that buy phones.

In other words, you’ve had bad news and thrown your dummy out of the pram. You’re not going to get any biscuit now that you’re not playing any more.

If the pre is a success, developers will still come out of the woodwork and write programs for it, cancelled camp or not. If it’s not a success, your participation or not probably won’t have had a lot to do with that.

I don’t know that I would have taken Palm’s approach, but they’re in charge for this game.

Why? Who’s more important here? Without you perhaps a few developers pout a bit, or choose not to release software. Without them, there’s no game at all.

Best of luck, and I hope you find a platform you can love.

-Ken

This news is way over blown.

We were very specific and direct with Aaron Hyde that we signed the NDA to cover the release date of the phone. Nothing else. The fact the the meeting was taking place or that we had an NDA was absolutely not part of the agreement.

Second point, Paul Cousineau and Chuq Von Rospach at Palm had asked us on a previous call to make sure the community knew they were talking to us. They were held under some tight restrictions about what they could say to the public, for obvious reasons, and had asked us to be sure the developer community knew they were engaged.

It appears that the two competing needs (communication to the community that Palm was talking to the independent developers via preDevCamp and secrecy) driven by separate camps clashed.

This, coupled with our frustrations based upon some other issues in our relationship with Palm led to the decisions by whurley and myself to exit the scene.

The worldwide movement we created under the preDevCamp banner is, by design, in tact and all local groups, as far as I can tell, are still planning their individual events.

Last point, Palm gets it now…

Pam Deziel, VP of Developer Marketing, responded on the Palm Developer Network blog this morning about the situation:

“We overreacted to the whole disclosure issue. We’ve been in stealth and super secret mode for so long now, we needed a real world conversation to see how we needed to work things so everybody can operate in their own environment.”

“I’m optimistic that we can find a good solution. And we’re going to keep talking. We’d love to get your two cents, concerns, and suggestions — feel free to join the conversation here, and be assured that even when we sometimes have to keep quiet, we’re always listening to your ideas.”

Read the whole post here: http://pdnblog.palm.com/2009/05/a-predevcamp-update/

Whurley and I are here to serve the community, not the corporation. When it became obvious that we needed to make a bold move to get Palm’s attention on behalf of preDevCamp, we moved. Whether you agree with our tactics or not, Palm is seriously paying attention to you now.

The end result has been a more active, genuine, serious relationship between Palm and its independent developer community. Everyone wins. This is what we, as leaders of the preDevCamp movement, hoped to create in the beginning. It looks like we’re here now.

Anyone want to talk to me about it personally, feel free to catch me on twitter http://twitter.com/giovanni, email at predevcamp(@)gallucci(dot)net or leave a comment on my original post http://blog.gallucci.net/2009/05/palm-doesnt-get-it.html

I’m thinking it’s water under the bridge now. Nothing to see here. Go forth and develop. I’m going camping: http://dallas.wordcamp.org

-giovanni
http://twitter.com/giovanni