November 28th 2009 | Posted by
Robert Werlinger

Some interesting things Palm related came from the Sprint Open Developers Conference last month; we heard reports of a Pre running on AT&T’s network, Palm unveiled their Ares development platform, and Palm engineers showcased the flexibility of webOS by adding code to the Alarm clock app live.
One of the more unusual things (in terms of carrier behavior) to take place over the course of the three day event was a presentation given by the evangelist for the WebOS Internals group: Rick Boatright. Yes, you read that right – Sprint invited a member of the most prolific open source webOS hacking and tweaking group to talk at its event.
The topics in the presentation range from an overview of the community and its rapid rate of growth, their relationship with Palm, tools the enthusiast community have developed, Rick’s thoughts on what open source can mean, the importance of community and more. There were also some interesting statistics: there have been 1200 unique users edit the wiki, it took the webOS community 12 days to access the underlying Linux operating system, and there’s about a 5% penetration of users using tools like Preware versus a rate of about 10% for jailbroken iPhones.
For those who are unfamiliar, WebOS Internals is a group of programmers and champions of open source who are responsible for the WebOS Internals wiki, Preware, the first video capture program for webOS, an on-device IRC client, hundreds of patches, and much, much more.
The presentation clocks in at a lengthy 45 minutes, and like Ben and Dion’s recent interview, is recommended viewing. It’s great to how Palm has been embracing the open source community and those who have been stepping outside of the official lines in their work with webOS.
You can watch the presentation here. Here’s a direct link to a movie file for Silverlight haters.

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