WebOS Android Theme Gets Legal SmackDown
| by PalmWebOS.org on August 13th, 2009 |
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Regardless of where your loyalties rest, you’ve got to give credit where credit is due – Android is a great platform. And plenty of Android fans think WebOS is a great platform as well… including me. Loving both, I was excited to see that a WebOS Theme was made available on Android Market!
Until Palm put a legal bitchslap on the websites hosting and linking to the application. A bunch of jargon and mumbo jumbo about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 followed, but I enjoy the use of the 1st Amendment by the conforming site:
Hey Palm and whats the deal with you hacking your pre to work with Itunes eh?
Seriously, Palm… imitation is the best form of flattery. All this would do is help promote WebOS and Palm as an elite smartphone platform… “Hey Look! Even Androids want to be like us!” And then when they have the money they’ll come and buy the real thing.
Seriously… let them have it! And I don’t mean that in a fist-clenched bullying kind of way – this is a compliment that Palm kind of ruined if you ask me.
1. jetpeach wrote on August 13, 2009
what in the world? this just ticks me off. palm needs to seriously embrace these helpers, not try to shut them down.
anybody know where i can send an email to complain about this to palm? i looked on there website but didn’t find a good link to complain to. any ideas the best palm contract who might listen?
i love my pre, it’s a great phone, but the app catalog blows compared to androids, and google wouldn’t treat customers this way. i like webos because it’s linux based and fundamentally a powerful platform with great potential. but if they don’t start helping people have some fun with their phones, palm will be truly finished soon…
2. lamont Cranston wrote on September 18, 2009
So the objection was to the trade mark use?
How about playing coy, like CentOS does when they talk about a “major North American Linux Distributor” instead of saying Red Hat?
Post images of the device running the app’d display, don’t print actual pre images. Apple v Microsoft established that you can’t copyright “look and feel”.
just don’t use their names….
Palm might be technically legal, but they are acting contrary to the spirit of open source, and that may come back to haunt them. Customers are not as clueless as companies think.