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

Does this mean....

[trippyd]

That the new combo OS, WebDroid, will be upon us?

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.

Re:Does this mean....

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that they release an update that will run on my Palm Pilot IIIc

Greatest little device I hardly ever used.

Re:Does this mean....

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Android likely has an unassailable lead in application availability; but I know that WebOS's superior windowing/'card/swipe' gesture system made me feel like I was kicking a puppy by comparing a XOOM to a TouchPad...

I'm not sure that it would matter quite as much at phone-screen sizes; but the comparison at 10 inches was pretty stark.

Re:Does this mean....

[JazzLad]

You want to run a modern OS on a 16mhz processor with a 320x320 screen? Good luck with that.

That said, I did love my IIIc back in the day.

Re:Does this mean....

[Anonymous Coward]

You consider Java an actual programming language?

Re:Does this mean....

[rwven]

You need to do a little research. Everything in the industry is pointing right at HTML5 as the future of application programming...especially with cross platform applications.

Re:Does this mean....

[rwven]

Please explain the logic behind that statement.

Best choice

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Best choice

[CockMonster]

It didn't work for Symbian, it won't work for Web OS either. It's dead, any employees thinking that this will lengthen their career should think again, unfortunately.

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

[J. T. MacLeod]

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.

Re:Best choice

[Forty Two Tenfold]

First of all, if they released it with good documentation, they're not simply dumping dead matter, it's a generous gift.

WebOS is based on GNU and so, most of the skill sets for developing Web or for any *NIX platform, will transfer relatively easily. And porting the entire platform will most likely be

...[moderately, non-uniformly] toilsome, because of drivers.

Re:Best choice

[PCM2]

it's a generous gift.

I'd wait until you hear the terms before you say that. If their plan is to GPL it and then dual-license it and force anyone who wants to build an actual product with it to buy a commercial license, "gift" might be a bit of an exaggeration.

Re:Best choice

[Anonymous Coward]

> any employees thinking that this will lengthen their career should think again

As a current webOS employee that fully expected to be laid off today, this announcement has *already* lengthened my career at 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:Best choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing prevents people from releasing commercial products from GPL-licensed code.

Re:Best choice

[anomaly256]

Unfortunately, I dare say the cellular stuff will remained closed. That's usually 3rd party IP.

Re:Best choice

[anomaly256]

Ofc, I am just guessing..

Re:Best choice

[PCM2]

You realize what you said is impossible, right? If they GPL it, that grants you enough freedom to build an actual product; so they don't have any leverage to "force" you to buy the commercial license.

Tell it to MySQL.

In practice, companies that produce commercial products tend not to want to release the source code to the proprietary portions of their products, therefore they choose the commercial license. It's not exactly "forcing" commercial customers to pay, but if the code was really a "gift" then it would be released under a BSD-style license or something similarly permissive.

Nice work.

[tripleevenfall]

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)

Re:Nice work.

[alostpacket]

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?

Re:Nice work.

[Anonymous Coward]

That will be tough. The crap is added by the carriers, so if they simply provide the code the carriers will add it on before they sell the device. Perhaps they could add something to the license, or make re-installing from source really easy for end users to simply load a "clean" copy?

Re:Nice work.

[nine-times]

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.

Well one of the things that drive Android fragmentation is manufacturer add-ons and locked-down devices, meaning that you're not running the generic stock install and you probably can't install the vanilla version on your phone even if you want to. My understanding is that's not so much Google's fault as it is the carriers' fault and the device manufacturers' fault.

So can HP handle that better? I'm not sure how. What leverage do they have over the carriers?

Re:Nice work.

[Locutus]

I agree and if HP spent all their efforts providing driver support for devices to be reflashed and left the user and OS stuff to the OSS community they might get somewhere. Doing this would initially enable the geeks to put WebOS on their devices, a few robots and probably some other interesting hardware. That could spin into more apps and more interest in the platform outside of just phones. Then it can prove its worth.

Otherwise, with only a short list of devices it'll run on there won't be much of a community behind it.

LoB

Re:Nice work.

[joshio]

So can HP handle that better? I'm not sure how. What leverage do they have over the carriers?

Here is my suggestion: follow a model similar to Nvidia. Allow the manufacturer / carrier to customize however they see fit, but require them to allow the reference build to be installed. Then, the people who don't care about it get what their manufacturer / carrier feed to them. Those who wish to customize/tweak can flash the same reference build that the manufacturer would be basing their own customized build on.

Re:Nice work.

[nine-times]

Yeah, but here's the problem: When HP says, "You must allow the reference build to be installed," what's to stop the manufacturer/carrier from responding, "Ok, then we won't use your OS"? What is their leverage to keep this actually open when Google can't even keep Android open.

OSS majority

[lorinc]

Does that mean that free operating systems are getting a more common scheme ?

Re:OSS majority

[larry bagina]

WebOS is linux (GPL), WebKit (LGPL), and some formerly proprietary code for interfacing the two.

This is a company dumping dead code that it doesn't have any more use for. (Much preferable to simply abandoning it.)

Re:OSS majority

[gstoddart]

This is a company dumping dead code that it doesn't have any more use for.

Didn't HP recently say they planned on using it in printers?

Maybe (though, admittedly, unlikely) HP is realizing they can use it for commercial products and have it open-sourced.

Of course, I seem to recall HP paying several billion dollars for Palm, so that's gotta leave a mark.

Re:OSS majority

[MichaelSmith]

This is a company dumping dead code that it doesn't have any more use for.

Didn't HP recently say they planned on using it in printers?

No, that was last week.

Re:OSS majority

[rrohbeck]

This is a company dumping dead code that it doesn't have any more use for.

Didn't HP recently say they planned on using it in printers?

No, that was last week.

Yeah. Eons given the frequency of changes in HP's direction.

Awesome

[catbutt]

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.

Re:Awesome

[characterZer0]

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

Re:Awesome

[catbutt]

Javascript isn't perfect, but its better than having do use a combination of PHP, Objective-C, Java, and Javascript to reach everyone.

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:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

The 90s called. They want their memes back! (And they told me to say this. :P)

Maybe if you stopped trying to write C, Java, Perl or PHP in it, you would be better in it and wouldn't have to hate it.
PROTIP: A prototype-based loosely-typed scripting language is NOT a object-oriented strongly-typed compiled language. Don't try to use it that way.
Right now, JavaScript has more elements of functional programming than C/C++ and Java combined. I recommend trying them, since they (especially Haskell-like ones) are way better than your outdated mindsets.

Re:Awesome

[characterZer0]

Prototypes, typing, functional elements, and abusive pseudo-OO are not the problems with JavaScript. The problems with JavaScript are as follows:

1) No threading.
2) It sounds too much like "Java", which leads to much confusion of newbies.

Re:Awesome

[TheRaven64]

What I would like is the seperation of code and UI so I can work on the underlying code and then somebody else can work on the UI code

You mean like NeXT had in 1988 and Cocoa / GNUstep have now? Interfaces can be drawn by UI designers and just wired up to controller objects.

Re:Awesome

[alvieboy]

Sorry, I have to disagree with you, at least in the present time.

I've been using some Web apps (javascript, html5, you name all techs involved), like floorplanner and upverter, and I find them barely usable. My computer is not however a high-tech one (Core2 Duo T2300 @ 1.66 Laptop, with Nvidia GeForce Go 7300), but it's specs would be *more than enough* to run such simple applications.

Perhaps the problem is not JS itself, nor HTML5. Perhaps the problem is we're using a technology which was not meant, on the first place, to do what we are doing with it.

It will take some time (and some standards) before we get Web Applications that can actually behave like native ones. But, my friend, it's not the time yet.

Re:Awesome

[aristotle-dude]

Have you tried multiple browsers? Not all browsers have the same performance with HTML5+ Javascript.

Re:Awesome

[shutdown -p now]

JavaScript doesn't suck because it's prototype-based. It sucks because it has horrible syntax (that is also too verbose; at least Perl is concise for all its flaws!) and screwed up semantics in several things that are done differently in all other languages (like scope of local variables). It has literally nothing better over Python or Ruby or pretty much any other "scripting" language other than PHP and VBScript. Most certainly, it's no good for serious FP - heck, it doesn't even guarantee tailcalls, and its syntax for lambdas is ridiculously long, especially for one-liners that are typical in map/filter/reduce.

Re:Awesome

[Archangel Michael]

That is hardly the "worst thing" about WebOS. The worst thing was it couldn't do simple things like join a Enterprise Wireless network like Android of iOS could, you know, by pointing to the WAP and filling in credentials and so on. Then it wouldn't authenticate against Exchange 2010 properly, like Android and iOS could with their Exchange Connectors.

I got my hands on one this week for the first time, after spending an hour fiddling around, scouring forums and beating my head on the wall ... I just gave up. (No, installing all the company owned CERTS didn't help, so don't even suggest that) .

I told the guy who got one (given away, brand new) No wonder HP quit developing it, nobody would actually pay for this crap. NOT being able to use the thing is the worst possible outcome for a device such as this.

Re:Awesome

[catbutt]

Far as I know, QT is not portable to browser. And I don't know anyone who recommends doing web apps in C++. And it's not generally appropriate for Android. C++ (minus the qt part) might be ok on iPhone for libraries that don't call directly into the Cocoa API.

So I'm having trouble seeing how it is so vastly portable to some of the platforms that are most relevant.

Re:Awesome

[alvieboy]

Yes, I did try Firefox 7 and Chrome 14. Chrome is a bit faster than Firefox, but not fast enough.

It's a pity.

Good Idea

[TheGrimmReaper]

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.

A few billion to acquire it, then open source it?!

[jpstanle]

Doesn't make much business sense, but at least the community can actually benefit from HP's blunders this time.

What good is this?

[fortapocalypse]

Unless you have something to run it on that you'd want to run it on, why does it matter?

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.

Are you sure? Waiting for decision to be reversed

[syousef]

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.

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:best of both worlds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two points:

1. They still employ the software side of the WebOS team. The only people who were laid off were the hardware guys.
2. They've already said they're looking at Windows 7 or Windows 8 for their next tablet.

Re:best of both worlds?

[tverbeek]

1. WebOS has a hardware component?
2. HP has also said that they were exiting the desktop market and looking to sell webOS.

Re:best of both worlds?

[shutdown -p now]

With respect to your #2, they have already officially backtracked on "exiting the desktop market".

Re:best of both worlds?

[b4dc0d3r]

And for your #1, WebOS was tied to hardware, until TouchPads were discontinued. It was a combined hardware/software platform that they bought from Palm.

The point is, they aren't getting software development for free as suggested. Some help probably, but not free.

And as far as looking to sell WebOS, that obviously didn't work or they wouldn't be opening it.

Re:best of both worlds?

[hey!]

You make it sound dishonest, but they're not putting gun to contributors' heads and forcing them to work on webOS.

A decade ago there was a lot of skepticism about Linux and open source in general. How could something that depended on altruism be sustainable? The answer was that open source doesn't depend exclusively on altruism; enlightened self-interest plays a big role in free software's viability. You choose to participate or not based on the benefits and costs to *you*.

Had, for example, BeOS been open sourced under a similar strategy, a lot of people would have been happy to contribute.

Great news!

[monzie]

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.

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.

What to buy?

[TAiNiUM]

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.

Re:What to buy?

[xelan]

There are supposed to $99 HP Touchpads on sale on HP's ebay site. I think I recall hearing the sale was supposed to begin sometime on Sat. Dec. 9.

Re:What to buy?

[naranek]

The preferred phone is Pre 3. I have one and it's ... well ... nice. Really nice. Not the superphone of my dreams, but really nice, and it's open. The webOS is marvelous, but there are a lot of kinks and small unpolished bits that are kind of annoying in the long run. I'm hoping opensourcing the OS will help fix those. The hardware isn't as good as I've been used to with Nokia phones, but it's nice never the less. The best points are the hardware keyboard and excellent design. The round shapes make it a unique piece of tech, and it fits in the pocket like no other, because everything's rounded. And did I mention it's open. People have been writing patches for years to improve the built in functionalities in all sorts of cool ways, so you get to customise it the way you like. OK now this is starting to sound like a pitch. I better stop.

Re:What to buy?

[keefus_a]

As a huge WebOS fan that only moved away from it because Sprint never got updated hardware, I am partial to the vertical slider. When I first saw the Dell Venue Pro (http://www.dell.com/us/p/mobile-venue-pro/pd) hardware I longed for that phone running WebOS (if you replace the dedicated smiley key on the keyboard with @). Add in a dash of microSD slot and upgrade the innards to more recent specs and I'm sold.

The catch is that nothing outside of existing Palm/HP devices fits the bill. One of the great things about WebOS is the touch area below the screen. Outside of the hardware specifically built for WebOS, nothing has that.

The Touchpad didn't have the extended swipe area, so I see no reason that any tablet (specs permitting) couldn't be a sufficient platform for WebOS. But I'm far less concerned with the tablet platform than I am with the phone platform.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Are you sure? Waiting for decision to be revers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Enyo:Nomad

[AdamThor]

Might one then say that Enyo is going Nomad?

Now just waiting on the ports.

[eheldreth]

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.

Obvious question

[MonsterTrimble]

contributing webOS to the open source community

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

Re:Obvious question

[ThorGod]

Yeah, if they want to avoid fragmentation, BSD seems the way to go. (CCL == BSD, I think?) 30 years later and we don't have distributions of BSD, we have 'branches'.

Re:Obvious question

[waferhead]

Yeah, if they want to avoid fragmentation, BSD seems the way to go. (CCL == BSD, I think?) 30 years later and we don't have distributions of BSD, we have 'branches'.

Absolutely, and all 5 users of each branch love it. >;-
(come on, you know you wanted to say it )

Re:Obvious question

[Khopesh]

Still no word on the license as of Dec 12. Hopefully it's because they're talking about this pretty seriously and/or wanting the announcement to make a second big splash. More likely, they're just trying to secure the (legal) rights to various pieces of code they may have sub-licensed themselves (and/or the search for submarine patents or accidentally stolen code).

I'm hoping this is LGPL, like GTK+ and Qt (though hopefully at version 3). This ensures any OS-level change must be submitted upstream, but there won't be any fears of the license virally infecting linked software.

Licensing aside, this really needs HP to dedicate paid full-time developers, which they do not look likely to do. It also needs serious and committed non-HP developers. Even with those two satisfied, any progress they make would be fully undone by a single hint of age to the existing devices, especially since they're all EOL'd. To get this on track and acknowledged as having a chance in the future, those full time WebOS devs would need some company actively developing hardware for it, or else a commitment to full hardware compatibility with some existing phone line plus some sort of non-opposing acknowledgment from that hardware's dev team.

While they're at it...

[MikeRT]

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?

Re:While they're at it...

[ThorGod]

Yeah, but unfortunately I think they just want free labor.

Re:While they're at it...

[cdrudge]

I'm sure Amazon and B&N will gladly hand over the keys to their bootloaders to allow HP's firmware to run on their branded devices. While we're at it, maybe Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony can all get together to allow any game to be played on any console.

Re:While they're at it...

[shutdown -p now]

What's in it for HP?

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.

Re:While they're at it...

[WiiVault]

This was the first thing that crossed my mind as well. webOS on my Kindle Fire would be amazing. I have a dual-boot Touchpad bought during the firesale whenever I don't need an Android specific app like Netflix I switch to webOS. webOS is better laid out and at times actually almost fun to use. Of course Android and iOS have the apps, so dualboot is great. Now if only it could triple boot with iOS (which for games and interface I prefer over Android), a guy can hope!

Re:While they're at it...

[WiiVault]

The Fire and the older Nook Color both have unlocked bootloaders. Checkout the XDA dev forum for links to CM7 and early ICS builds for the Fire. Sadly BN locked the Tablet bootloader which has caused quite a few geekslike myself to return them for Fires, despite the hardware advantage of the Nook.

Re:While they're at it...

[youn]

maybe Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony can all get together

Please send me one of your flying pigs.

Yeah! I want a flying pig too. and can I get it in green, just like the one in angry birds? :p

Sam Flynn did it

[fortapocalypse]

I saw him in the data center, and chased him onto the roof where he parachuted to a motorcycle, but we caught him!

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

[Attila Dimedici]

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.

Maybe the fire sale was a strategy?

[bigsexyjoe]

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.

Re:Maybe the fire sale was a strategy?

[godrik]

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.

Unfortunately, that does not count for much in the regular world... Even in the geek world, the amount of people that would switch from android to something else just based on license would be minimal. I am pretty opiniated on licensing issues, but moving from android (a hacked version) to webOS does not make much sense...

Re:Maybe the fire sale was a strategy?

[tverbeek]

A company that changes CEOs every 3 months cannot be said to have a "strategy".

Actually it probably will wither and die.

[mbkennel]

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.

Re:Actually it probably will wither and die.

[jonwil]

It may not be commercially successful but just like Android, it will probably be ported to all kinds of platforms by various geeks doing it for fun. More to the point, the good bits of WebOS will be snarfed up by those doing other open mobile operating systems like Android, the MeeGo ecosystem (with all its different bits and names and stuff) and the guys doing FreeSmartPhone.org

Re:Actually it probably will wither and die.

[UpnAtom]

On the surface, this seems like the way to go. HP/Intel/Samsung/Maemo all pushing a superior alternative that can run Android apps and that can get some marketshare.
They all have the same goals - can they get it together?

Re:Actually it probably will wither and die.

[dirtyhippie]

Good points, but what do you have against finishing your

Re:Thanks but no thanks

[Kenshin]

webOS isn't HP's baby. They just adopted it when they bought Palm.

So I was right ...

[wdef]

Or at least half right: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2413878&cid=37313984

the kindest thing HP could do now is open source WebOS and hope the Chinese put it on cheap smart phones

Re:Still irrelevant

[spottedkangaroo]

People said this about nokia and blackberry before iphone came up, and they said the exact same thing before android came up. So the comments about too many strong players are clearly wrong, you just push a strong player out of the way when you come up. But you're also right. It'll never get that point. It's lacking two rather important things ... What WebOS needs is a strong partner that actually gives a shit and an actual device that ships with it. Last time I checked people rooting their phones to run other shit "voids your warranty" and shit like that, so you're never going to see more than like 0.05% of device owners ever installing something else, and of those only a small portion will try WebOS.

I'd probably try it. I loved it. One really nice thing on that platform was that rooting and installing shit was *SUPPORTED*. They had an app to fix it when you fucked it up, and if you bricked it (the guys on #webos-internals knew of a way, but they wouldn't say); they'd replace it.

I like that it's not illegal to root phones, finally, but we need legislation that says: if your device can't support rooting, then you need to replace it, sorry. I have different feelings about overclocking. Clearly overclocking can't be supported. Palm wouldn't replace them if you fried them from overclocking, but they had to kinda take your word on it too.

Meego is already there.

[Colin Smith]

Rooting an N9
Settings -> security -> developer mode

Re:Meego is already there.

[markdavis]

And WebOS was/is also "rooted" on all devices. You just clicked on developer mode. Done.

It had been that day from day one.

Re:Meego is already there.

[vadim_t]

That's not real root. Try using insmod to see what I mean.

Now on N900, there things work like they should.

Re:Meego is already there.

[markdavis]

You are probably correct. But it was in there a looong time, and pretty quickly from release.

Re:Meego is already there.

[MtHuurne]

Indeed enabling developer mode gets you a non-root terminal or SSH login. You can get real root on N9 through "devel-su" though, so while it's one more step it's still easy enough.

Re:Meego is already there.

[vadim_t]

No, that doesn't do it either.

Like I said, try to insmod something (not already loaded) after devel-su.

Re:Meego is already there.

[MtHuurne]

(Just tried it.) You're right, insmod complains of insufficient permissions. It is uid 0 though, but apparently Aegis is blocking certain actions at the kernel level...

Re:Meego is already there.

[vadim_t]

There has been a lot of talk about this in the community. I've not had a chance to experiment much yet, but as far as I gather, if you want Aegis gone, you'll have to flash a new kernel.

The N9 will allow it to boot, but part of Aegis includes encrypted datastores, with the encryption being performed by a security chip. If an unsigned kernel is loaded, the bootloader will tell the security chip and the encryption keys either change or are invalidated, which makes the data stores unreadable. Apparently that breaks several of the official apps, not sure which exactly.

Also the official kernel will refuse to work once you modified the phone with an unrestricted one and force you to reflash.

Re:Meego is already there.

[aitikin]

Day one it was type "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart" in what is now called just type, but then was universal search or the launcher. So yes, pretty close to from day one. The Pre was released on June 6, the dev mode accessibility was posted on Engadget on June 9, so I guess day three, but it was available on day one.

Incidentally, how long did it take for the G1 to get rooted? An iPhone? And what happens if you do it wrong with those devices? They're bricked. With webOS, about the only way to brick a phone was to throw it against a wall. The webOS doctor would always (even when I really screwed my Pre up) save the day.

HP making more hardware.

[naranek]

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.

Re:HP making more hardware.

[unixisc]

I thought that HP was looking @ making Windows 8 hardware, not WebOS. Releasing WebOS so that there will be a choice other than Android is good. If it is GPLed, question would be how does any OEM who uses it deal w/ any MS patents that it contains? I can see MS hitting them w/ a bill. Maybe if HP makes it GPL3, can they avoid the M$ tax?

iLO

[Scutter]

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.

My theory...

[BenSchuarmer]

HP leadership is now using a Magic 8 Ball to make all their decisions.

Re:My theory...

[Anubis350]

You're post made me laugh, went to mod it funny, hit redundant... commenting to fix the modding mistake :-/

Gun to shoot yourself with...

[Junta]

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.

And now, the game changes

[cshark]

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.

I had a palm pre

[greywire]

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.

Enterprise tablet?

[waferhead]

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.

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

[SuperMog2002]

Yes, HP is a US company. So is Dell, which is also a mass computer company.

Re:WebOS / BeOS?

[larry bagina]

Some of the BeOS programmers worked on WebOS. But then again, some of them worked on iOS and some worked on Android and some worked in Windows Mobile 7 Phone Edition or whatever it's called. Hell, some probably worked on your mom.

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

[evilviper]

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...

That's it, it's doomed

[arglebargle_xiv]

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?).

Re:That's it, it's doomed

[iamacat]

Fsck! I haven't got the memo that Java and Solaris are dead. And here I am, busy implementing a major public platform and a service on a technology with no future.

It is actually a good move for HP if they are positioning webOS as an alternative to Android, which is open source and has the largest smartphone OS market share.

HP/UX

[unixisc]

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.

Re:About Time

[Pieroxy]

This is about the smartest thing HP has done in awhile. About time somebody understands the power of Opensource.

What makes you think they understand it?

Eheh

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Please, please, please !

[DrYak]

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.

Free alternative

[DrYak]

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).

No, no. From day one.

[DrYak]

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.