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.
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)
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.
Doesn't make much business sense, but at least the community can actually benefit from HP's blunders this time.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'
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!
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
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.
Only dumb birds land downwind.
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.
webOS isn't HP's baby. They just adopted it when they bought Palm.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Rooting an N9
Settings -> security -> developer mode
Deleted
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.
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.
It matters because plenty of people have these things called "smartphones" and "tablet computers" and wouldn't mind using webOS on them.
HP leadership is now using a Magic 8 Ball to make all their decisions.
Didn't HP recently say they planned on using it in printers?
No, that was last week.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.