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How HP and Open Source Can Save WebOS
snydeq writes "If HP wants a future for struggling WebOS, it must invest in the platform, not abandon it, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'It seems HP may only be truly committed to the platform if it can offload the cost of developing and maintaining it. Yet if that's what HP hopes to achieve by opening the WebOS source, it's bound to be disappointed.' Instead, HP should dedicate its own developer resources and 'release as much code as possible under an Apache, BSD, or similarly permissive license. Dual licensing under the GPL might leave HP with more opportunities to monetize the platform, but it won't garner as much interest from hardware makers, who are what WebOS needs most.'"
The problem is that most people hear open source and can think you can instantly get other people to do the work for you. Largely that's a problem made by FOSS zealots who have, and still do, trumpet that as a feature of open source. However, that's not how it works. There largely isn't any big and known open source project that isn't backed by a large company. Apache is backed by all the large IT companies, even Microsoft, and Firefox has their own developers and funding via deals with Google and other search engines. Android and Chromium is backed and developed by Google. Linux development is largely driven by the largest distros, or paid by them.
So stop telling companies that open source is some magical answer to outsource the development process. It's not. People have lots of things to do, and apart from some basement dwellers, don't have time. In this world time is often even more important than money, especially if you're good at something. So open source tries to make free what people have (money) but they away their most precious thing, time. That's backwards thinking.
100% agree! When I was ready for a new phone a year or 2 ago, I went into my sprint store and looked around. First I got the Pixi, but I loved WebOS so much that I went in and exchanged soon enough so I could get the Pre. A truly amazing experience. True multitasking and there was a small community of people hacking the hell out of their Pre's. That's the awesome thing with WebOS, it's SOOO easily customizable! Within that day I was making boot splash screens and new app icons, along with slightly overclocking the processor. But then I soon realized that the hardware was seriously lacking and even worse, so was the community. I ended up taking it back to get an Android, because I really only saw room for iOS and Android. I was a little disappointed that customizing the android (hero) wasn't as simple as WebOS, but I soon learned the ins and outs. Fast forward a couple of years later, and I have TONS of Android phone choices with AMAZING specs. Currently I have an Samsung Epic 4g. The processor is overclocked to 4.3ghz and I have many custom rom choices. I'd love to see WebOS come onto better hardware, and see WAAAY more apps dev'd for it, but I'm not sure that will happen.
I loved the WebOS UI and I'm sad to see it the platform go, but really at this point, people should get a clue and move on. WebOS is dead. You can play with the existing builds as much as you want but HP has proven time and again that they don't give a damn about the platform. If they did they wouldn't have scuttled the thing and gotten rid of it.
Sweet dreams are nice but they're only that: dreams. WebOS isn't coming back, folks. Get on with the program.
Last time I checked there wasn't a need for another "open" mobile OS..... Now if they were to open source their TouchPad drivers, that might be something worth doing.
Sigs are bad for you...
If other people's actions are irrational, then you're spared the difficulty of revising your worldview to accomodate them. It's a safe course, but an intellectually puny one.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
HP gave WebOS cement galoshes. It is basically abandonware now.
Don't expect any help from HP for any plans for the survival of WebOS. Any plans that depend on that are doomed to fail.
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BMO
I doubt HP is going to dump it on a git server and forget about it. They are going to continue to do with it what they want to do with it; that being the mysterious purpose they are wanting a buyer to give them a low cost license to use it. Opening it up to the OSS community will give people who find it interesting to port it to different hardware. There is no shortage of people out there rooting devices to put something that interests them on the device. Having a proprietary version hasn't helped Nokia sell interest in QT. If anything it has had a negative effect. There are those that worry about Nokia getting sold to Microsoft. After seeing what happened with Sun getting purchased by Oracle, I think the OSS community would be more hesitant if it were duel licensed.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
As I write this from my web-browsing, movie-watching, music-listening, casual-game-playing, bittorrent-downloading, GPS-equipped, ssh-plus-RDP-over-VPN-connecting 1.8-lb device, I respectfully disagree.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
There is definitively a need for tablets. I don't know what it is, but I see people carrying those things around everywhere. I have no idea what they are used for (except if they are reading books - that'd be kinda a bad use for LCD tablets), but people wouldn't take them out of home if they were useless.
Rethinking email
There are plenty of powerful open source projects that are not backed by corporations. Eigenbase existed before LucidEra and DynamoBI. Ingres started out as a community driven project, went commercial, and Postgres took over as the community-led version. Not only is it still around, but it is probably a few orders of magnitude more popular than Ingres now. Debian, Arch, KDE, and anything from the GNU project.
It doesn't matter one bit whether HP continues to develop WebOS. Android, while being developed quite well, is not thriving because it is open source. It is thriving because it is free. The idea that they can drop it and let a community take over is bullshit because community projects are led by people who use the software. You might think that there are tons of people that use Android, but really, the phone manufacturers are the true user-base of Android. They are the ones that put the finishing (copywrited) design on the OS, lock it down, install the uninstallable shit programs, and refuse to give updates. Why would a community every get involved in that?
Android will continue to thrive, but only because google is developing it and monetizing it. WebOS does not have a way for HP to monetize, and the phone manufacturers have already sunk their development into Android. It doesn't stand a chance.
Many of the OSS people they hope to attract are already busy porting Android to the TouchPad. By waiting till Android is nearing a usable release to open source WebOS they've lost those devs.
The hardware is appealing but the software EOL, the replacement already arriving and no-one seems very interested in any WebOS device that's not in a fire sale. Too little, too late.
I love WebOS. Between the excellent multitasking implementation, unobtrusive notifications, ease of rooting, excellent homebrew support, it's great. To me it just feels like a refined, excellent operating system for phones and tablets. That being said, as soon as I unboxed the pair of TouchPads I purchased for my wife and I, the first thing I did was install CyanogenMod on the pair, despite it being an alpha build.
Why?
Apps.
Nook app? Android has it, WebOS doesn't.
Netflix? Android has it, WebOS doesn't.
Amazon MP3 (for cloud player access)? Android has it, WebOS doesn't.
Musicnotes (digital copies of sheet music we've purchased online)? Android has it, WebOS doesn't.
And so on. Nobody is going to spend a lot of time developing or porting apps to WebOS since at this point, it's pretty much dead to the average consumer. Even companies that do want to develop on it like Astraware are waiting to see if enough people buy the apps they've put out for WebOS before they bother to port more - it has to make financial sense. So I end up spending most of my time on my TouchPad in Android, and I doubt my wife will ever bother to boot WebOS again.
Now, if someone were to set WebOS up so that it could run Android apps and the Android Marketplace, I'd happily wipe the Android partition off my TouchPad and never leave WebOS land again. Here's to hoping someone can do that.
I've got an iPad 2 and I'm not even sure what use it is to be honest.
It's basically just used as a really expensive portable web browser, and not much else, because whilst the apps look great on the Apple advert, when you actually download some of those that are showcased like the NASA app and the spreadsheet app, you find that the few screens you see on TV are actually basically the entire app because the apps have about the depth of a small spoon. You can't actually do anything useful with the apps because they really are that shallow and completely devoid of 99.99% their desktop equivalents would have.
It makes a nice catalog for my girlfriend who can at pictures of the latest fashion items too I suppose, but as a device it's not terribly useful.
Most people I see with them on the trains tend to be using them as very bad eReaders - larger, heavier, less battery life, harder to read.
They get use without a doubt, but I agree that I think they're most likely a fad amongst the general public. We have use for them in some areas, at work we use them as a basis for some eLearning projects, so certainly there are niche areas they're suited, but without a doubt I can't see the idea that they're going to replace general computing has any merit, at least without a major transformation as to how we interact with them because the current touch UIs don't do it. Typing an e-mail on the iPad is a million times more of a pain than just walking upstairs to my study and typing it out on my computer, or, if I've bothered to bring it downstairs or charge it, to use my laptop, or netbook. Swype on my phone makes things much better, and it'd be less hassle with that, but Apple wont let us have nice things like that so it's not like that's even an option to make the tablet slightly more worthwhile.
As a longtime software developer and all around computer power user, I find my tablet to be fairly useless. It has a lousy onscreen keyboard, runs limited applications, and can't really be used to do MANY of the really cool things that I've spent the past 20 years doing on computers.
My wife, on the other hand, is a technophobe schoolteacher, and is rarely seperated from it nowadays. It gives her a simple way to do her pointless social and entertainment things...Facebook, email, Youtube, etc...without having to deal with all of that "computery" stuff. If you ask her, she'll tell you that it's the greatest bit of technology ever invented.
But the real eye opener came from my kids, including my about-to-go-to-college daughter who is incredibly computer literate and who I taught the fundamentals of BASIC coding when she was only four years old. To her, and my 14 year old son, it's just another computing device. There are some things that are better on computers, and some things that are better on tablets (who wants to watch a streaming movie on a laptop with a keyboard in the way?) To them, the entire discussion is silly, as both devices have their own purposes. The kids simply move back and forth between them without a second thought.
We are contrained by the limits of our own prejudices and experiences.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.