I believe Palm may own the rights to what remains of Be Inc., but Palm sold the rights for the Palm OS to Access only for Palm to recently licence it back again (at least, Palm now have a generous licence for Garnet aka v5 Palm OS which is pretty much the same version they sold to Access).

Access are now busy trying to develop a modern version of Palm OS which uses Linux with a Palm compatability layer called Access Linux Platform (ALP). I guess the plan is/was for Access to licence ALP back to Palm at some stage in the future.

Here's a link to an article on Palm Info Center with photos of ALP running on a Marvel (ARM) development board and also video of a phone handset (probably just a keyboard + screen wired into the same development board) from 3GSM 2007. Comments from the Palm devoted follow the article at the bottom of the page - the first comment made me chuckle as it sums up Palm owners who have been missing out on so much for so long:

ALP actually looks pretty rubbish!