Slashdot Mirror
HP Making webOS Open Source
Several readers sent word of HP's announcement that the company will be contributing webOS to the open source community. According to HP's press release, they will continue to be active in webOS's development, and one of their goals will be to avoid fragmentation. ENYO, the application framework for webOS, will also go open source in the near future.
That the new combo OS, WebDroid, will be upon us?
From an economics perspective, this is probably the best return on investment they will get: goodwill.
I think they could have an opening here. If they really make efforts to avoid fragmentation and get get WebOS onto some future phone handsets, they could avoid some of the mistakes that have been made with Android.
Let people install WebOS however they want, don't load it up with crapware, give the users full control over the system. Make this the truly "open" mobile OS. ("open" means more than being able to see the source)
Does that mean that free operating systems are getting a more common scheme ?
Video of some good progressive thrash music
This is excellent news. The best thing about WebOS is that it is built on things that people are standardizing on elsewhere. Javascript, html5 etc. WebOS even has node.js built in, which really is a start at tying all these things together -- client side web development, server side development, and "native" app development.
This is clearly the direction things are heading, and like or hate Javascript, it's going to become the lingua franca for everything but system level or the most computationally intensive stuff. People get tired of reimplementing things they've already done in different languages. There are a lot of things converging right now, and this just might be something that pushes things over the top.
I'm personally not a fan of WebOS but I see this as a good thing. In my minds eye, the very least it will do is be good will for HP.
Doesn't make much business sense, but at least the community can actually benefit from HP's blunders this time.
Maybe it can join the ranks of other software that rose from the ashes when its owners dumped it on the open source community, like the browser that lost the war against Microsoft. No really, thanks. It's better than throwing it all away. Not much better, but still.
Unless you have something to run it on that you'd want to run it on, why does it matter?
Nothing the management of HP has announced lately has actually stuck. It is bad enough that they are indecisive, but the fact that they can't stick to a decision means I'm not touching anything HP for a very long time. It would not surprise me if after open sourcing it and a lot of developers put a lot of time and effort into it, they attempted to close it back up.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So HP has decided that they want to continue using and directing webOS, but they don't want to pay for its development.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I hope someone ports WebOS for my BlackBerry Playbook. It has got really good hardware but the software ( read apps ) leaves much to be desired. Also this would mean that other tablet owners would have a choice as well - other than Android or BlackBerry Tablet OS ( QNX ) I am assuming that it would be very difficult to get other OSes on the iPad.
I think that anything HP can do to move people away from platforms controlled by their competitors, the better.
If webOS has all the right things to take off in a big way, a device maker like HP can really benefit. I don't think HP likes having to pay the microsoft tax on all their PC's (they'd sell a lot more cheap pc's if they could reduce the price by the cost of windows), so if the next generation of devices are built on open standards like javascript and html5 take off, all the better for HP.
Yes it would have been great for them if the world embraced webOS while it remaining fully owned by HP, but that just wasn't going to happen. The only possibility of getting people really interested -- given the head start both Android and iOS have -- was to set it free. It may turn out to be the smartest decision HP ever made.
Alright, I'll bite. What is a good WebOS device for sale (I know, they're all discontinued) that we could buy and install the Opened OS on? The Veer appears to be the newest phone and the HP Touchpad the newest (only) tablet. I haven't previously paid much attention to their product line so I'm curious what hardware the WebOS enthusiasts prefer.
The current CEO is not the same person who purchased Palm (that'd be Hurd), and they're not even the person who fumbled the ball (that'd be Apotheker). Meg Whitman seems to be actually trying to sort out the mess left by the last two, and if that includes cutting the loses on WebOS then so be it.
Once it has actual been released they can not take it back, they can keep on distributing the old version under a closed licence and make their own improvements or drop financial support for the public version, but they can not take it back.
Might one then say that Enyo is going Nomad?
-- "Oh. This guy again."
WebOS is awesome. I had a pre for a while and the only reason I moved to the Evo was the crappy hardware the pre was designed on. The screen on that phone cracked three times (right at the control button each time) and I did my best too baby it. Once it cracked while I was holding it in my hand. WebOS on decent hardware. I'll take that any day.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
contributing webOS to the open source community
Under which license? GPL? BSD? Apache? Open source means a lot of different things.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Wow this would be great. Take the WebOS UI consistency and push it onto that craptastic android interface!
I've seen HP's Service Center, Quality Center, Motherboard (google "class action lawsuit Hp Motherboard"). I'll stick with a non-HP based software for all of my software needs
Hire a dozen or two engineers to work full time porting WebOS to popular Android tablets. Start with the Kindle and Nook tablet. Who says they need to make their own hardware for the foreseeable future if they can make it fairly simple to get WebOS working on a $200-$250 tablet you can get at Best Buy?
I saw him in the data center, and chased him onto the roof where he parachuted to a motorcycle, but we caught him!
This is about the smartest thing HP has done in awhile. About time somebody understands the power of Opensource.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Well, not when it is put that way. However, that is not quite the situation that exists at HP. One set of management bought Web OS with a business strategy in place to capitalize on it. That strategy proved to be a failure (or at least the implementation of that strategy proved to be a failure). A new management team came in, discovered that they have this asset that has a strong "fan club" among geeks but no current way for HP to make money off of it. They decided that they had two choices, stick it on a shelf somewhere or release it as open source. The first makes no money and in no way advances the company's interests. The second, also, makes no money, but does provide the company with some badly needed positive PR among a group that significantly influence opinion among their potential customers. Additionally, if the geek fans of WebOS can turn it into what they claim it has the potential to be, it will reduce the market power f several of HP's competitors.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Does WebOS have any relation to BeOS?
Maybe they sold the remaining stock of WebOS tablets cheap to prime interest from geeks and get on Slashdot. And now that they have our attention they want to take on Android. While Android is open source, Google has lost their rep with on Geeks on purity. Everyone thinks of Android as Big Brother in your pocket. If they are smart they can make WebOS, the mobile phone platform that RMS can approve of. And then they'd have something of value.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
WebOS was an irrelevant also-ran from day one. There are already too many strong, established players in the mobile OS space. An OS requires critical mass in order for anyone (outside of a few hardcore geeks) to write software for it, and WebOS will never reach critical mass.
The market will support two or maybe three players. BlackberryOS is currently hanging on to 3rd place and even it may not survive despite having it's own cadre of rabid fanboys. Android isn't without it's warts, but it's the only viable open platform for mobile devices.
Bottom line is that this isn't going to woo anyone away from iOS, but it could divert valuable brainpower from making Android better. Forking, fragmentation, and duplication of effort are the banes of the FOSS community. Look at how many millions of man-hours worth of effort have been wasted due to holy wars and ego trips.
Unless Google does something radically Ballmerian with Android, WebOS will bitrot. That's because there's no clear commitment from HP to have a continuous source of money, and there isn't any obvious evidence HP will be very ge
Post opensourcing, Mozilla was lousy for quite a while until Firefox. Firefox was pretty successful because there was a 1st version of a good product, skilled people motivated to work on it, and very importantly Google supplied them with quite a bit of stable money: payment flow from the Firefox home page. Then, Google had a strong interest in preventing IE from taking over, and funding Mozilla fairly generously was aligned with that goal. Now, Google has other imperatives and they have their own browser. As a consequence Firefox has less stable leadership and if they lose the revenue stream
By contrast, there is no particularly compelling reason for HP to fund WebOS development. What's in it for them? Does it help sell HP hardware? No. Does it help damage a competitor? No. Putting a few HP employees on it is not the same as giving lots of money to an independent foundation who can hire.
If HP needs those people to do something else, they will give up their WebOS, because people will follow the paycheck & whoever is doing their performance review.
the kindest thing HP could do now is open source WebOS and hope the Chinese put it on cheap smart phones
Rooting an N9
Settings -> security -> developer mode
Deleted
What I'm rather wondering if this is a deal between HP and Intel. Intel had their problems with MeeGo, and Nokia dropping out. WebOS always seemed like a great alternative, especially as Tizen pushed back their alternative platform development quite a bit from MeeGo. Right now they have... Android, and possibly Windows in the future.
And HP gets their... UI for... printers.
Meg Whitman said in an interview with The Verge that they are planning on making more tablets later. We'll see how that pans out, but it might give webOS a bit more traction.
Also the open sourcing webOS might open the door for the Dalvik VM and running Android applications on webOS. That would make things interesting.
Only dumb birds land downwind.
It would be fantastic to see it embedded on iLO boards in HP servers. The ability to extend the iLO with user-supplied code would be terrific.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Too bad they did not leverage the Palm name and put out a Palm phone long ago. Ship has sailed.
I don't see any reason for this even as open source. If there were an open phone hardware for example, I would still use Android for the app support.
Unless a shit load of say Linux apps were ported to it or something.
Yes! I hereby proclaim that 2012 will be the Year of WebOS (*cough*Linux*cough*) on the Phone(*cough*Desktop*cough*)... wait, stop me if you've heard this before...
(and before you go telling me I shouldn't mock it, I am a webOS developer and actually know a thing or three about the platform).
It's dead Jim. Open sourcing it isn't going to bring it back to life, any more than an autopsy will bring a cold, dead body back. But, the good news is that we'll learn some stuff from it that we otherwise wouldn't, and I'm sure it'll be of use to someone, somewhere. Somehow. Maybe.
HP leadership is now using a Magic 8 Ball to make all their decisions.
The whole point of the server service processors is to always work no matter what. To maximize the chance of this happening, the hardware vendors want the software running on them to be as tested and deterministic as possible. If end-user code fork bombs or triggers OOM killer to effectively ruin the running state of the service processor, that is bad. Ideally, you'd think an end-user would realize the blame was all their own, but two things occur:
-'Why didn't you make your platform bullet-proof no matter how my code misbehaves?'
-'I can't tell that *my* code is broken so I'm assuming perceived instability is due to the vendor'.
On the *other* hand, if you need to run custom code, you have an actual *operating system* to modify. Generally all the benefits of running *directly* on the service processor can be accessed by your choice of running in the managed OS and talking to the existing code or similarly doing it over the network.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I was hoping this would be the way it would go. I think it's going to be a game changer. Expect HTC and others to jump on this.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
and now I'm sporting a new android phone. Because I had no choice after HP killed webos and the hardware.
Open sourcing it is probably the best thing they could do, at this point.
If you think WebOS is dead, let me tell you, in many ways it was and is still miles ahead of android.
I severely miss the productivity of the seamless, quick flipping between running applications that even my much more modern android phone (with at least double the processor speed and memory and more than twice the screen size) cannot fathom. Yes android multitasks, but switching between apps is a pain, even with third party task switchers. And there's nothing as slick and reliable as synergy and the webos messaging UI.
Here's what I'd like to see: port the WebOS development "stack", the card GUI, and synergy (with the email, messaging, and facebook apps) to android. Find a way to get android apps to run within the webos card GUI. Thats an "app" I would happily pay good money for. I hate my android phone sometimes (in the same way I hated not having many apps on my palm pre). Lots of apps though.
I think this would be a better goal than just porting WebOS to various hardware. WebOS will probably never have the apps that android has. Eventually, I'm sure, Android will catch up in the GUI and such.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I do not believe that is true. If you look at companies grossing the most off of OS's, they are selling open source software. If you look at the companies making the most profit, they are selling proprietary systems. This is why HP is the only mass computer company left in the US (Other than Apple, and is HP a US company?), and almost sold that division.
HP had a way out of the race to the bottom that is Android, and likely Windows Phone 7 if it ever takes off. They simply failed to ship compelling products in a timely manner.
If they get the copyright assigned (for new code) to them, they can take the new version and distribute it under a closed license as well. Still you are right they can't take it back.
HP doesn't pay MS anything for Windows. It's all subsidized by the preinstalled crapware.
That's not real root. Try using insmod to see what I mean.
Now on N900, there things work like they should.
Confirmed! I did rm /home/opt/ once on my n900. Wait, I think I just made the argument for not allowing root. shit.
I never quite got why HP never pushed the Touchpad for enterprise use.
I can't think of another tablet that had Java SE available to install.
(Ignoring the Win7 versions running on x86, mostly reskinned keyboardless netbooks)
There are a ...few... companies that use Java for many internal apps, (or at least user facing portions) and given the tablets specs it seems a natural.
I'm still hoping to score one Monday assuming HP still does the Ebay dump, the (sold) prices for the 32gb seem to have been hovering around $250, with some occasionally going for ~$150 for no apparent reason.
Perhaps HP will end up doing something "like" IBM, in the way IBM makes ...a few bucks... off Linux, perhaps WebOS will get some traction and provide some return.
Yes, HP is a US company. So is Dell, which is also a mass computer company.
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
Yes, the massive head start that the open source android platform has will be entirely erased by open sourcing webos at this late date... Somehow...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
When a major corporation makes one of their previously proprietary crown jewels open source, it's an admission that it's dead.
(And for those who are going to say that WebOS was never close to being one of their crown jewels, what would you call an HP jewel? HP-UX? JetDirect?).
I don't know that I agree w/ the GP, but Solaris, after being OSS for some time, went back to being CSS. Yeah, OpenIndiana is still alive, but any enhancements they make to Solaris won't be in OpenIndiana, so that will have to depend on its own team.
But GP does bring up a good point - if WebOS is worth Open Sourcing, why not HP/UX? After all, for all practical purposes, it's a single platform OS for Itanium, and all its competitors - FreeBSD and Debian - are FOSS. So why not make HP/UX FOSS as well? Its Integrity Servers too could be @ a dead end.
Going to get modded down for this but the reason there aren't dozen of distro's for BSD is because nobody uses it. If you REALLY want no fragmentation, go HURD. That is so unfragmented it got ONE install.
Enjoy.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hurd's strategy probably would have been at least moderately successful, Hurd was fired for lying, Leo was hired from SAP and he apparently decided that he only knew how to run SAP and tried to change HP into it, part of that was ending webOS. He was fired. Now Meg is brought in to clean up the mess, this seems like probably a great move, especially if HP moves very quickly now. The only question left, which others have asked is "What is in it for HP?"
In order for this to actually be useful HP needs to release it under a very tightly worded APACHE or GPL3 based license.
And it needs to be 100% unbridled and unbranded.
LET ME SAY THAT AGAIN.
100% Unbranded. Everything from the radio band code to the bootloader needs to be open and changeable. And it needs a completely fluid apache or GPL3 license.
PERIOD.
Keep WebOS's "Full Linux userland" base.
Keep WebOS's nice "Stack of Cards" multitasking metaphore.
Give it ability to run android apps (so port Dalvik VM and expose the necessary Android API).
Thus give it also a really nice eco-system...
Bam! Instant win.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
On the other hand, we *do* have free and open alternatives :
- android has its own cell stack (and a fusion between android (linux+crazy java userland) and webOS (full linux with a formely-propretary GUI) would be the best thing to happen).
- there is also freesmartphone.org FSO (the stack developped by OpenMoko people) (and BTW, it is already being ported to support Palm Pre hardwares).
So even if the cell part of webOS stays closed, and only the GUI gets opensourced (well, in addition of the full Linux basis which was already opensource from the begining) it would be possible to build a full webOS from available sources only.
(Well, in fact the bluetooth stack would need to be swaped too. The current stack isn't BlueZ based).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Not from day one. Since the first software update i believe
No. From day *one* indeed.
What the first upgrade brought is that, in addition to the funny but overly complex to type inside-joke (the Konami code spelled in *full letters*), the first update brought an easier command to type to turn the dev mode one (webos's release date).
So you could have had the dev mode on day 1. Simply you got sore thumb for typing the whole fucking shit on the tiny keyboard.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]