HP Making webOS Open Source

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Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 9, 2011 @07:30AM 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.

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Best choice by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-09 07:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

From an economics perspective, this is probably the best return on investment they will get: goodwill.
1. Re:Best choice by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-09 08:14 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
2. Re:Best choice by J.+T.+MacLeod · 2011-12-09 08:14 · 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.
3. Re:Best choice by jonwil · 2011-12-09 12:35 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
Nice work. by tripleevenfall · 2011-12-09 07:32 · 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 · 2011-12-09 07:58 · 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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Awesome by catbutt · 2011-12-09 07:33 · 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 · 2011-12-09 07:40 · 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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2. Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-09 07:51 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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:Does this mean.... by rwven · 2011-12-09 07:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

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? by tverbeek · 2011-12-09 07:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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1. Re:best of both worlds? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-09 07:47 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  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:A few billion to acquire it, then open source i by catbutt · 2011-12-09 07:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

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:A few billion to acquire it, then open source i by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-09 07:43 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Obvious question by MonsterTrimble · 2011-12-09 07:51 · 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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While they're at it... by MikeRT · 2011-12-09 07:59 · 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?
Sam Flynn did it by fortapocalypse · 2011-12-09 08:00 · Score: 4, Funny

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 by Attila+Dimedici · 2011-12-09 08:03 · 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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Re:Thanks but no thanks by Kenshin · 2011-12-09 08:12 · Score: 4, Informative

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

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HP making more hardware. by naranek · 2011-12-09 08:27 · 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.
Re:Does this mean.... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2011-12-09 08:39 · Score: 4, Informative

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:Meego is already there. by markdavis · 2011-12-09 08:48 · Score: 4, Informative

And WebOS was/is also "rooted" on all devices. You just clicked on developer mode. Done.
It had been that day from day one.
My theory... by BenSchuarmer · 2011-12-09 09:30 · Score: 5, Funny

HP leadership is now using a Magic 8 Ball to make all their decisions.
Re:OSS majority by MichaelSmith · 2011-12-09 10:19 · Score: 4, Funny

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.

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