In the next few months, Palm Inc. (Quote, Company Info) will officially separate into two publicly traded companies -- Palm Solutions (hardware) and PalmSource (software). Since announcing the split last year, PalmSource CEO David Nagel has forged ahead with a completely new handheld operating system (OS 5.x), new places to grow (China) and new product opportunities (Fossil's Wrist PDA, Garmin's iQue 3600 GPS-enabled handheld).

Now as he stands at the crossroads, Nagel tells internetnews.com that spinning off is the best thing that could have happened and that he is seriously contemplating the benefits of adding some PalmSource code to the open source community.