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HP Delays WebOS Decision
itwbennett writes "Following Tuesday's report that HP is looking to sell WebOS, CEO Meg Whitman and HP employees gathered for a late-afternoon meeting. According to The Verge, Whitman told those gathered at the meeting 'It's really important to me to make the right decision, not the fast decision,' adding that a decision would come in the next three to four weeks."
"a decision would come in the next three to four weeks".. and then a reverse decision every three to four weeks thereafter.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Palm may have bought BeOS, but webOS is built upon Linux with a fairly standard GNU userland with a few proprietary bits and toolkit centered around HTML/CSS/JS (along with a native devkit.)
It'd be a steal for Samsung/Intel if they could snag it and open it up as part of Tizen. Squeeze out some efficiencies on ARM (and the native toolkits to boot) and leave the GUI a blank slate, and they'd have a ready to use platform that was fully open source at all phases of development.
On the other hand, it could be bought by someone and allowed to rot like the mobile platform company Motorola bought ages ago.
Turning to HP, this week was their Board’s opportunity to solidify its reputation for incompetence and bad manners. They rose to the occasion.
http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/09/25/how-bad-boards-kill-companies-hp/
there are so many companies making so much money off of open source..
Red Hat, Oracle and IBM are making plenty of money of FOSS Linux. Almost all of Google's future revenue stream would be at threat without Android (since Apple and Microsoft would love to lock them out of the market) I think you would find that there are quite a bit of benefits from controlling the fundamental platform that others build on.
they paid $1.2 billion for WebOS....
The fact that you even mention the money they paid shows that you have no clue. Please look up, learn about and fully accept sunk costs. The existence of Android means that the maximum cost for a mobile phone operating system is just a little more than zero. Further, it means that, in order to sell an operating system for zero you are expected to provide full source access. Companies which use Windows Phone expect to get massive subsidies (e.g. for Nokia, order of billions to tens of billions of dollars).
The value of WebOS for HP is that they are a company which is about to be locked out of a bunch of different markets. Mobile is being divided between Apple and Google, with Microsoft desperately fighting to get a look in. Databases are being divided between IBM and Oracle, with Microsoft taking some of the low end. The embedded interfaces market looks like it's going to go 100% Android with maybe a small exception of the short term US market. PCs and Printers are stagnating. Open sourcing WebOS, probably with an agreement with IBM which knows how to play well in FOSS, would be a play which could disrupt that market and produce a space for HP to sell it's products in future.
What HP needs to do is to make something that is properly guaranteed to stay open source; not like Nokia did where they failed to get others to contribute because clearly controlled the user experience and use that to collect together the Manufacturers who are afraid of Google's level of control of Android and know that collaboration with Microsoft always leads to commoditization and margin squeezes.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();