Palm Licenses Palm OS Garnet Source from ACCESS

ACCESS, the company that owns the source code the Palm OS Garnet, has announced in a press release today that they have reached a new licensing agreement with Palm, Inc. that grants Palm a perpetual license for the Palm OS Garnet operating system source code. Palm will pay ACCESs $44 million.

Under terms of the agreement, ACCESS has granted Palm specific rights to modify the code base of Palm OS Garnet for use in its devices such as the Palm Treo smartphone family and the company’s other handheld computers. The agreement also grants Palm the right to use Palm OS Garnet in whole, or in part, in any product from Palm and together with any other system technologies. To ensure forward-compatibility of Palm OS Garnet applications, ACCESS and Palm have agreed to continue to measure compatibility against the compatibility test harness in use between the two companies.

This agreement between Palm and ACCESS ensures that Palm will continue to develop and deliver solutions built on the Palm OS. Looking forward, one has to wonder how this announcement will effect devices that are released in 2007 that us Palm OS as the platform. Many fans of the Palm OS, myself included, welcome this news.