I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the Palm Pre is about as open as Apple. They have a website where they claim to distribute the source code to their platform, but it is only what they are legally required to distribute. In fact, even that they fall short on: many of the packages aren't compilable as they are holding back on critical header files.

The libpurple-adapter, in particular, must be licensed under GPL (as libpurple itself is), but Palm has been telling representatives of the open source community that they would have to sign an NDA to get access to the full set of files required to make it work, which only be distributed only under a very restrictive temporary license. As someone who has spent a lot of time fighting similar causes with Apple (I'm the developer behind Cydia) I can say that they would /never/ pull shit like this: when I've sent GPL complaints Apple has always fixed the issue rapidly, and I would even receive e-mails from all related departments apologizing for the mixup.

Seriously: if Palm can't even compete to Apple's standards for openness, then you know something horribly evil is going on over there.

For the record, Android is not just about running stuff in Java: the developers at Google are actively working on the semantics behind having accessible JNI, some of the existing applications (including the OpenGL demo from Qualcomm people rave over) are mostly written in C, and we are likely going to have an entire Android "NDK" for doing native development to play with. Android is definitely the entire platform, including Linux.

If you search around on the android-platform mailing list you will find discussions of the various issues you are bringing up (such as multiple devices, architectures, etc.) and the various solutions (and non-solutions) people have for them.

Yeah. This makes the "instructions" rather dis-useful: they are simply "install X" (as X is already ported and we already know how to get Debian setup on the device), "run the X VNC server", "connect with an Android VNC client". The instructions should likely just have been placed in the article summary rather than forcing us to click through to AndroidFanatic to just get disappointed :(.

That was also my thought (I'm the guy who organizes the g1-hackers mailing list, and has been pioneering Debian on this platform, and any changes required to init and the kernel needed to support it) ;) I almost responded "if you check, I actually registered the domain name, and once I finish the changes required to get Debian installed to / I am likely to put the final instructions there with a bug tracker", but then I remembered I hadn't /actually/ bought it yet. I quickly did just now. ;)

For the record, this is just a shell script that runs the commands listed here: http://www.saurik.com/id/10. AndroidFanatics generally doesn't reference it's sources. At least this time they (arguably) provided some value in packaging, but that usually isn't the case. The Android Market Browser it has, for example, is just a republished download of http://www.cyrket.com/. It used to be an iframe, but when I told them I wasn't okay with that they decided to just wget the contents. They don't even have the intelligence/decency to reformat it at all, making the entire thing quite flagrant. Frown pants.

I got that working ;P. It's JamVM with a custom connector from Java to Objective-C that works like PyObjC, allowing access to all of the frameworks on the device. It's actually been around for _months_ now, but I have been quite busy and have been unable to really market it well enough. If anyone wants more information, please e-mail me: saurik@saurik.com. My website is http://www.saurik.com/, and I've had a bunch of time in the last couple days to actually write articles for my site, and JocStrap/iPhone/Java is next ;P.