Charles Stross Weighs in on the Foleo

Charles Stross, my new favorite scifi author, has just weighed in on the Palm Foleo. W00t!! I love it when worlds collide like this, things get all plasmic. And you know my dislike for standing on solid ground for too long.
I was going to hold off on commenting about the Foleo. But I’m highly caffeinated and talkative. It’s a Saturday so almost no one will be at work, Mario caught whatever bug it was that knocked me out last week and is asleep on the couch, and Russ is watching Alex today. That’s pretty much everyone I know in the real world… so I’ll use my blog for what God intended them to be used for, wild speculation and useless blathering.
First of all, what do I love about the Foleo? Linux, first and of course. Not just running Linux, but running Linux and meant to be an open platform. Personally I think that gets right to the heart of what makes Palm interesting. When I got my first Palm 1000 I got it for exactly one reason: there was a GCC based toolkit that I could use to build apps for it myself. If I couldn’t make apps for it myself I would not have gotten it. If the tools weren’t open source I wouldn’t have gotten it. If it were some random set of tools outside the established project of GCC I wouldn’t have gotten it.
It was something that was just right about the initial Palm platform. However, it wasn’t also something that I think Palm did intentionally. If I remember correctly there were a few commercial toolkits for the platform, but then someone in the outside community realized that support for the processor instruction set was already in GCC, the architecture just needed to be supported by [...]

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