Palm buying PalmSource?
It's technically just a rumor for right now, but there's a report going around Palm is getting ready to just go all the way and buy up PalmSource, the software company which was spun off from the original Palm back in 2003. (This would come after paying PalmSource nearly $27 million for sole rights to the Palm brand name; you'd think Palm could have waited and bought both the name and the company at once and saved themselves some cash.) If true, it'd only be the latest chapter in the increasingly messy story of a company that's been the drama queen of the handheld world ever since its founding back in the early Nineties - there have been so many spinoffs, name changes, splinterings, and mergers for Palm that we imagine that even people who work there have trouble keeping track of the company's history.
Rumor or not, it wouldn't be a shock to see this happen. It's no secret that PalmSource has been falling apart ever since the two companies split — it probably wouldn't cost Palm very much to buy PalmSource, and they'd be able to lock down the Palm OS — but could somebody remind us why they split up in the first place? Oh yeah, because they thought that the Palm OS was destined to conquer the world and that the only way to accomplish that was to uncouple the hardware and software parts of the company.
