I find it a little funny that TealPoint, makers of some truly awesome software for Palm's now-decrepit Operating Systems of days gone by, whipped out a launcher called TealOS that pretty much apes the WebOS that will supposedly "save" the bacon of the beleaguered handheld company. You know, Palm, the people who, after Apple dropped the ball, ran the PDA into the end zone back in the 90's?

See, if you out-innovate a company like Palm, you're going to get smacked with a cute "stop it" from someone's legal department. In this case, TealPoint has been told in no uncertain terms to stop distributing copies of TealOS (you can see it in action in the video above -- until Palm lawyers tell YouTube to pull it). Lucky for you lovers of fine software, you can get this rare vintage until Monday, March 30, 2009. My condolences to the families of the engineers who are going to burn some midnight oil "to try to get as many bug fixes and requested improvements in as we can" before Monday.

According to Engadget, a Palm rep had TealOS on a Pre at one point and seemed pretty stoked about it. Chalk that up to ignorant bliss, I suppose, as someone at Palm wasn't quite cool enough to grok how awesome this tool is -- especially if you are NOT rocking a Pre. Yeah, the Pre, the phone we don't know exactly when it will appear or what it will cost (but we do know it'll be a Sprint-tastic exclusive). Maybe this isn't funny. Maybe it is sad that Palm feels so threatened by such a tool (which only mimics the app launching portions of WebOS and doesn't provide a framework for creating applications) that they have to crush it. It's sadder still, as TealPoint's outgoing message on their tealtalk forum says "the program's success came at a badly needed time." Sound like the crashing economy and plummeting Palm marketshare has been unkind to them. Good thing they've got a friend like Palm in their corner, right? Yeah.