It looks like the open-sourced Binder (the fancy multithreading component framework underneath Palm OS 6, which began its life as BeIA 2.0 during the final months of Be, Inc.) has finally been officially released:
Contributing to the Open Source Community - ACCESS and PalmSource have contributed Open Binder, a component object framework, similar in general concept to DCOM and CORBA, but better scaled for use on small devices. Open Binder provides a unique inter-process communication (IPC) paradigm implemented as a kernel-loadable driver, and incorporates a broad range of programmatic utility classes and frameworks. PalmSource and ACCESS have released the Binder driver and its associated frameworks to the open source community. For more information, see www.openbinder.org.
Elsewhere: Jason (pretty much the mastermind behind the open-source effort).
Update: Eugenia has posted what I think will prove the definitive reportage of this release: OpenBinder introduction & interview with Dianne Hackborn.
Update 2: Slashdot covers the general PalmOS-Linux announcement. Nobody seems to have noticed the Binder part (except Eugenia); who can blame them, given the way it was buried in the press release?
Update 3: Wow, look at that cluttered architectural block diagram. A lot of unpleasant things there, like GTK and GStreamer (when we had a perfectly awesome rendering engine and media framework already built—that is, completed—for Binder). And hey, check it out, the nebulously-named “messaging framework” lives on! I swear, that thing will never be finished until someone decides to actually throw a team at it (instead of a pale blue rectangle on a diagram and a checkbox on a features list).
February 15th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
So hey, when are you guys at Palm giving away the perfectly awesome rendering engine and media framework to the nextGen BeOS people — yellowTAB’s ZETA and Haiku? ;)
February 15th, 2006 at 11:48 pm
While I would dearly love to see those released, there is no way I would go back to PalmSource to try to make it happen. ;)
February 16th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Mikael, I’m working on the media-framework front. It looks considerably less likely that the rendering engine would ever be open-sourced, but one can always hope.