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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.

10 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Best choice by Anonymous Coward · · 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 · · 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. 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

      --
      Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
    2. Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  3. best of both worlds? by tverbeek · · 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.

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  4. Re:A few billion to acquire it, then open source i by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  5. 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.

    --
    I call it 'The Aristocrats'
  6. 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.

    --
    Only dumb birds land downwind.
  7. My theory... by BenSchuarmer · · Score: 5, Funny

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