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HP Making webOS Open Source

Posted by Soulskill on from the had-it-in-the-palm-of-their-hand dept.

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.

9 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Nice work. by tripleevenfall · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)

    1. Re:Nice work. by alostpacket · · Score: 4, Interesting

      But how? If they use a license that forbids locking the phones and/or removing features and/or adding bloatware, who would make the phones? What carriers would sell them? Not saying your wrong at all. In fact I very much hope they drive carriers more towards being dumb pipes -- but the devil is in the details on something like this. What would the license need to be? GPLv3?

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  2. Awesome by catbutt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Awesome by characterZer0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The best thing about WebOS is that it is built on things that people are standardizing on elsewhere. Javascript

      The worst thing about WebOS is that it is built on things that suck that people are standardizing on elsewhere anyway. Javascript

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  3. Obvious question by MonsterTrimble · · Score: 5, Interesting

    contributing webOS to the open source community

    Under which license? GPL? BSD? Apache? Open source means a lot of different things.

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    I call it 'The Aristocrats'
  4. While they're at it... by MikeRT · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  5. Re:A few billion to acquire it, then open source i by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
  6. Re:Best choice by J.+T.+MacLeod · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The community at large had little reason to care about Symbian. webOS has many things that are quite attractive about it for people that are not already committed to Symbian.

  7. HP making more hardware. by naranek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Only dumb birds land downwind.