- I’m Director of Open Source Technologies for ACCESS, responsible for stuff like community development, open source strategy, etc. I was formerly director of the Core Technologies department, responsible for the kernel, drivers and “low-level middleware”, after having spent ten years at Apple (so I have _some_ geek cred…) I recently oversaw the release of a number of useful and somewhat higher-level middleware components as the open source “Hiker” projects at http://www.hikerproject.org... I’ll be presenting on these at the Ottawa Linux Symposium later on this year.

- We’ve been working for a while with selected “Inside Track” developers, of whom AstraWare is one, and early release versions of the SDK with–as you note–some good success. We’ll be having a “Mobile Open Source” track and a “Developer Day” again this year at LinuxWorld San Francisco.

- We’ve likewise been working with our PDK (Platform Developer Kit) with a number of folks, including handset manufacturers (whom I won’t be naming, that’s up to them) and operators, including FT/Orange. We mutually announced a number of months ago that the ACCESS Linux Platform was going to be an “Orange-approved” open source-based platform and that we’d be collaborating on an Orange-specific suite of applications. That’s currently in progress, as are various other efforts.

- 3GSM rocked. We got a lot of traffic and a lot of interest. We demonstrated the platform on a couple of development boards from Marvell and TI as well as a form factor development device from Sophos Systems (think “Green Phone”, but using more up-to-date software unencumbered by dual-licensing schemes, and in a nicer color). I wasn’t able to personally attend–I was obliged to go to a Linux Foundation meeting in frigid New York as opposed to 3GSM in sunny Barcelona–but all reports would have been damned with faint praise by the term “incredibly positive”.

So, no, not dead. Quite the contrary, I’d say.