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Let me try a free flow, free association exercise on this topic. It's been a while since I thought about these things much, so I might have some of the facts messed up a bit.
If I remember right, Palm acquired a period of rights to use PalmOS from Access. Then they acquired permanent rights to use Garnet (PalmOS version 5... Cobalt was version 6, and it never saw the light of day in a product). That's why "Powered by ACCESS" shows up, I suppose.
But the race is on for a PalmOS compatible OS that runs on Linux. ACCESS is the old PalmSource that was originally split off from Palm to divide the HW from the OS. They certainly have a lot of experience with PalmOS. However, one needs to realize that over the years, especially with the acquisition, ACCESS/PalmSource has probably lost a lot of the important people and talent and knowledge. On the other hand, even writing a failed OS can have tremendous value going forward.
My concern about ACCESS is that they are probably after the feature phone mass consumer market, rather than the hardcore high powered handheld computer wanted by the business user or geek. (Like me.) But Sharp seems to have a history of doing more of a handheld computer type of device, so that might work out well.
Palm doesn't license from ACCESS anymore because they felt it was critical that they have complete control over the OS. It allows themselves to both differentiate their phones, and also to determine what areas development resources are focused on. Not to mention that they won't be at the mercy of another company's licensing terms or business plan. Until they adopted Windows Mobile, they were completely dependent on ACCESS for a while, and I don't think they were comfortable with that.
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