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.

Comments

Best choice

[Anonymous Coward]

From an economics perspective, this is probably the best return on investment they will get: goodwill.

Re:Best choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Comparing WebOS to Symbian is rather inaccurate.

WebOS is based on Linux and so, most of the skill sets for developing for any linux platform, will transfer relatively easily. And porting the entire platform will most likely be much less of a problem than Symbian. The biggest issue I ever saw with WebOS was simply that it was closed and restricted to HP.

Re:Best choice

[jonwil]

The problem with Symbian is that the Symbian releases were totally useless for actually compiling and installing onto any platform. And there was absolutely NO documentation on what any of the stuff was or where to find the potentially-interesting bits. Nor was there any documentation or info to point people in the right direction if they wanted to write hardware interface code and drivers and try to get the code running on a given piece of hardware.

With WebOS, assuming they open source all of it and dont keep important parts like the user-space binary daemon and libraries used to talk to the cellular modem closed source, all the stuff needed to actually get a self-bult OS running on a real world device like the TouchPad or the Pre should in theory be there. And again, if its all opened, porting it to new platforms should be a matter of whether you can find the needed hardware information for the platform you want to port to.

Re:Does this mean....

[rwven]

Evan as a fanatical android fan, I can tell you that you're dead wrong. webOS has a tons of great ideas both in the interface and underlying app-system that would be very useful in a combined scenario. The ability to write apps in the webOS way, for an android device, would be fantastically awesome.

best of both worlds?

[tverbeek]

So HP has decided that they want to continue using and directing webOS, but they don't want to pay for its development.

Re:A few billion to acquire it, then open source i

[catbutt]

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.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just write it in C++ with Qt. Get far better speed, vast portability, and no need to use a shitty language like Javascript.

Re:What good is this?

[the linux geek]

It matters because plenty of people have these things called "smartphones" and "tablet computers" and wouldn't mind using webOS on them.

Re:While they're at it...

[Anne Thwacks]

maybe Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony can all get together

Please send me one of your flying pigs.