There’s no better way to start our careers at Palm than by getting reamed by open-source pioneer and legend Jamie Zawinski, one of the driving forces behind the release of the Mozilla source code and someone we’ve talked about in recent months in another context.

While a blog post isn’t the right avenue to talk about all of the issues that Jamie brought up, we’re following-up with him directly and will bring it to a conclusion. We obviously goofed in how we communicated with Jamie, and Dion and I take some of the blame here as our staff had been waiting for us to come on-board to get to some of these items.

We do want to take this opportunity to clarify a few things and share with you a bit about where we at Palm are with our developer program.

Our App Catalog is very much in beta right now, precisely because we want to take time to get it right prior to a full consumer launch. We have been collecting a bunch of feedback from developers and it is helping us prioritize and structure the program. In the brief three months since the launch of the Palm Pre, we have learned a great deal from the community!

We’ve seen some folks assert that Jamie’s case indicates a general pattern at Palm that we don’t really care about developers and aren’t operating in a developer-friendly manner. While we undoubtedly have some work to do here, we hope that people do notice how we treat the “homebrew” community (e.g. PreCentral) and how our current SDK agreement calls out the inspectability and reusability of our own Palm applications. (By the way, several applications from the homebrew community have already made it into our App Catalog.)

While we have yet to finalize and announce our developer program, we hope these points demonstrate our general attitude of embracing developers and empowering them. We’re trying to strike the right balance between locking down our device and making it a free-for-all. Like all great things, this will be an iterative process and we are eager and open to your participation and input to make it better for everyone.

We are sorry that Jamie feels the way he does, but we’ll fix what’s broken and are going to deliver a fantastic opportunity to developers as they in turn help create a fantastic experience to users.

We have a lot more to say on this topic, so watch this space. Dion and I are part of the developer community; we’re listening to what y’all say and we’ll speak up and participate in discussions.

And hey, look for an announcement soon that goes into more details on our developer program.