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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.
It doesn't matter. When it comes to platform choice the end-user's opinioin rarely matters, especially those of nerds. Nokia's N900 was one of the most customisable and Linux-based etc, etc, mobile phones ever developed. They only sold 100,000 of them worldwide, the geek market is unprofitable. Operators are uninterested in WebOS, they're too busy right now trying to make Windows Phone compete with iOS and Android.
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 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.