the naughty term: "reverse engineer" ;)
too bad not too easy, eh?

Well, I'm not sure the "naughty terms" really help here, because Palm is actually making Pre a (slightly) more open platform than, for example, the iPhone. A certain wiki built to share information on tweaking the Pre under-the-hood recently changed the term "rooting the Pre" to "Accessing Linux" just to get rid of those connotations with illegal/unethical practices... Palm gives root access to the Linux underneath... so you don't have to steal it in any way!

But there are several different things we're talking about here:

- one is getting to the Linux system and tweaking some text file (javascript, HTML, CSS) to get a different behaviour;

- another is reverse engineering some binary system files (generally too time consuming and unproductive);

- a third thing is being able to easily write apps for the Pre without being stuck inside a Web Browser (which is what the whole Pre UI is) and javascript. This is were a different SDK would come in handy; but perhaps this goes too much against the whole Pre architecture for them to ever release such a thing.