Palm gives us a demonstration how they have _not_ understood Open Source

As you can see in this post by Jamie Zawinski, Palm is doing as much as they can to prevent any Free / Open Source application development on their WebOS.

One really has to ask himself whether they have completely lost their mind. This very Free Software and Open Source development model has created the kernel, libc and many other components of their software stack. So Palm can clearly see and experience the benefit this model has to them.

Yet they chose to deprive all third party developers and their users from that very same freedom by

• Not providing a way to install applications from third party websites or even physical storage media, thus
• forcing all application programmers to use their application store, and
• requiring that those application programmers do not disclose the software source or object code on any other website

This is so screwed, I literally want to bang my head on the wall for this level of stupidity. Can somebody please get some sense into Palm? They seem to have not only forgotten what has made their old PalmOS so successful (thousands of 3rd party apps that anyone could write + distribute), but also seem to lack any understanding of Free and Open Source software.