Slashdot Mirror
HP To Open Source WebOS
First time accepted submitter pscottdv writes "This year the artists formerly known as Palm had quite a rough few months with HP dumping the hardware side of their own webOS mobile computing platform – their most recent move, having been announced just last month, is live today: open sourced webOS for all. While the actual main product which will be known as Open webOS 1.0 will not be released until September, they've already got the Enyo piece of the pie available today."
It's official: iOS now has more marketshare than Android. Reuters reports that Apple completely erased Android's marketshare lead, confirming earlier reports by both Nielsen and NPD. Over 150 Android smartphones couldn't outcompete the iPhone 4S. With 37 million iPhones sold last quarter, Apple is the largest smartphone marker, and their profits exceed Google’s entire revenue, $13 billion to $10.6 billion. Finally, with 15 million iPads sold last quarter, the tablet market is now larger than the entire desktop PC market.
Remember that Slashdot triumphantly posted in January 2011 about Android surpassing iOS in marketshare. A year later when the opposite happens? Not a peep. Talk about bias.
The clock is ticking, Fandroids.
Ooooh yeah!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
GreatBunzinni has been posting anonymous accusations listing a whole bunch of Slashdot accounts as being part of a marketing campaign for Microsoft, without any evidence. GreatBunzinni has accidentally outed himself as this anonymous poster. Half the accounts he attacks don't even post pro-Microsoft rhetoric. The one thing they appear to have in common is that they have been critical of Google in the past. GreatBunzinni has been using multiple accounts to post these "shill" accusations, such as Galestar, NicknameOne, and flurp.
That's not the problem. The problem is that moderators gave him +5 Informative and are now modding down the accused, even for legitimate posts. Metamoderation is supposed to address this by filtering out the bad moderators, but clearly it's not working.
This "shill" crap that has been flying around lately has to stop. It's restricting a variety of viewpoints from participating on the site and creating an echo chamber.
Infiltrated by Google employees and well-wishers, Slashdot consistently offers justifications for every bad behavior and terrible decision coming from Google. Just look at the privacy changes article in which fanboys banded together to make sure Google was perceived as the good guy and that anyone critical of them was modbombed.
Just to recap, Google is a multibillion dollar advertising megacorporation that was caught by the German government sniffing people's wifi data (they "accidentally" did it for three years before admitting it only when authorities threatened an investigation), forced people to use real names on Google+ and admitted it was an identity service and not a social network, stuffed Google+ results into the search engine without any competing social networks even though they have those networks indexed by the search engine (hello, Microsoft tactics), said that the only people who care about privacy "have something to hide," hacked into Mocality to call its customers, removed H.264 support in Chrome out of "openness" only to turn around ship the closed-source Flash plugin, withheld Android source from the public but shared it with privileged hardware partners so they could have a leg up, abused their Android compatibility program to make things difficult for smartphone makers who chose Bing instead of Google, and on and on and on.
With all this crap they pull that would get them completely trashed if they were Microsoft or any other company, there's one reason and one reason only that they have been propped up as the good guy on Slashdot all these years--Linux. They use Linux. Slashdot is a Linux advocacy site, and so because Google uses Linux, they are good guys and get a pass for everything. That's all it takes to get Slashdot to love you. Just use Linux.
Hypocrites. When Microsoft used their Windows monopoly revenues to fund development of Internet Explorer and release it for free to try to dominate the web market, everyone here cried "antitrust!" But when Google uses its web search monopoly revenues to fund development of Android and release it for free to try to dominate smartphones, everyone defends it. For anyone who was on Slashdot during those times, to see Google doing all the very same things Microsoft did but get a completely different reaction is surreal.
Slashdot is a bubble. You only get pro-Google, pro-Linux news. Major news occurring elsewhere is often days late, if it gets reported at all. The Google+ search results fiasco is huge all over the tech sites right now, but there's nothing about it here, as if it doesn't even exist as a controversy. And did you know iOS surpassed Android in marketshare by the end of 2011 according to three research firms? With how obsessed Slashdot is over marketshare, and how they constantly trumpeted Android's marketshare all the time as a victory last year, you'd think it would be big news. But, no. This is pro-Google territory, pro-Linux territory. Gotta keep the natives happy for more page views.
This will get modded down because trolls have taken over the moderation system and openly subvert it. That's fine. It just proves my point about how Slashdot reacts to anything outside the partyline. This site's news reporting is old, antiquated, and slow, but the news isn't even why people come here anymore. The part of the community still remaining (after its years-long exodus to Reddit, Hacker News, and other sites, which is why traffic has decreased so dramatically on most Slashdot stories today) only comes here to pat themselves on the back for thinking a certain way. "Yeah, Microsoft is still evil! Yeah, Google is still the good guy! Yeah, Apple is still for chumps!" It's the year 2000 forever on Slashdot.
Yet another large open source project to further tax the talent pool? I wonder how much attention it will get.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why would a developer work on this when there are other, more widely adopted platforms to develop on?
There's a new enyojs.com website, where you can read about Enyo and try out some example apps, as well as downloading the current version.
HP Making WebOS Open Source - December 9.
If they had done this from the start I believe they would have fared much better.
It's almost interesting how off-topic the first several topics of articles have become these days. You get random google bashing, accusations on trolling, mac praising, and what have you in the first posts, in articles entirely unrelated to these comments.
Are trolls trolling trolls trolling shills trolling?
But there are hundreds here that enjoy WebOS, and find it vastly superior to Android in a lot of ways. Hell, first thing I'll do is work to get it on my Galaxy S2. Android can learn a lot from WebOS. In time perhaps they will merge the good from both, into a mobile OS that is on par with iOS in usability.
Meant to paste this one.
I see a lot of posts about why HP is dumping it into the open .... if people will bother with it .... what dev would actually work with it ....
Between WebOS, and pretty much every other FOSS platform device environment (meego.. ?) out there I have to wonder just how much the wheel being reinveted?
I'd argue that the 'strongest' future-proof environment will survive, but it seems to be the one with the most monetary backing. I'd say design has little to do with it these days.
While WebOS is not yet open sourced, the operating system is sufficiently open and accessible that there is a significant open source community devoted to it: WebOS Internals (http://www.webos-internals.org) They have hundreds of OS tweaks (called "patches"), custom kernels, new services, apps, etc. Furthermore, WOSI worked with HP to develop the roadmap for open sourcing WebOS.
One of the big things that releasing this framework does is let existing WebOS developers quickly port their apps to Android and possibly iOS and WP7. It may be counter intuitive, but giving developers a way to produce apps for other platforms actually keeps them in the WebOS community. There are already WebOS apps that have been ported to Android (http://www.webosnation.com/first-open-source-enyo-app-jumping-other-platforms-paper-mache-android-flashcards-everywhere). This means that the good WebOS devs (and there are several) will get to keep developing WebOS apps that quickly cross-compile to Android.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
To give this gift to the world, instead of selling it to an equity investor.
But WebOS within itself is a decent OS. Some things feel a bit unfinished, but nothing like I'd been told to expect. I had originally bought the device planning to install Android on it. But I'll just wait until Ice cream sandwich comes out, and then have a dual boot machine. The fire sales got a lot of machines out there, and I wouldn't doubt that new machines running the OS might be in the offing.
And as a long time Mac user, I'm not at all in agreement with the idea that there will be one to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So ... HP has yet to figure out how to extract their right-foot from their back oroface .. i.e. their ass hole.
Wonders of wonders.
This company really knows how to fuck themselves rightly and the laughs just keep on cuming.
you got to be kidding. This thing sucks so much I could replace my Dyson with it. To type on it, as I'm doing now, is worse than typing on an iphone, drunk, on a traffic jam, in a motorbike. The thing is so damn slow and unresponsive as a 386sx with 1mb running emacs.
Simple things as keyboard responsiveness and click accuracy seem to be absent. Copy and paste fails half the time, even when it says stuff was copied. Don't get me started on text selection, sound quircks or missing messages on the chat application, or sound/video quality on the video/phone app.
I've never used an android tablet, so they might be as well as bad. But compared to the iPad 1, this thing is a complete piece of beta software (oh and the patches from the community are absent on the latest release. Apart from that, I am using everything - new kernel, overclock, govnah , etc)
Projects like this tend to attract mainly programmers who would work on something obscure anyway. People who will make themselves seem special like the guys who were still using Acorn computers 10 years after the company died and while unable to accomplish anything useful on them, would insist on using them for all their daily tasks. Sure, when Acorn was in production it was quite advanced and really fancy... but so was Motif and CDE... which looked like dinosaurs a year after KDE and Gnome came around, yet people kept using it.
Point being, the people who insist on being the Open WebOS people will spend a bunch of time on it, but they wouldn't have really furthered any other projects that much. The OpenSource community is driven by a handful of major projects of which most have corporate backing. WebOS, well I don't see any companies investing heavily in its future.
Nokia tried that with Symbian... what happened?
First, Symbian^4 was scrapped.
Mister Oily Pecker was replaced with an ex-Microsoft man.
Then, Meego was hyped up, and then cast aside for WP7 (Stephen Elop's burning platform memo).
The Symbian Foundation was turned into a licensing body.
Finally, Symbian was cast into the software graveyard called Accenture.
Moral of the story: it doesn't matter how good or open your OS is.
When no one is using it, when there are few or no new devices running it, it'll die with a whimper.
Poignant, but true.
Besides the tablets no longer sold, is there any hardware that can run WebOS?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I was a massive fan of Palm and wrote several years ago (around 2005, website now defunct) about the need for Palm to ditch Palm OS and develop their own Linux based OS. As such I was thrilled when WebOS launched - I had a launch day Pre and Pre 2. WebOS was admittedly pretty terrible until WebOS 1.4.5 but that release ironed out a lot of bugs and there was a short period in 2010 where it looked like Palm may crack it - they hired some great talent and partnered with some of the big devs to bring their apps to WebOS; sometimes for free (Monopoly, The Sims, Need for Speed, etc). The card-based system was intuitive and offered true multi-tasking that still isn't matched by any current mobile OS - it was truly groundbreaking stuff. Unfortunately Palm never had the resources to build on that success and it is sad to how subsequently lost their way.
What happened next was a total mess - the biggest downfall was how they alienated developers by changing the SDK from Mojo to Enyo - possibly a required change but the way they handled it was appalling. There was a long period when Enyo was released but it was impossible to even buy a device that ran it and the SDK was not even available to devs without jumping through hoops to sign an NDA. They then made promises to bring Enyo to their first and second generation devices and subsequently changed their mind. They never got round to publishing a roadmap of which hardware would support which SDK or WebOS. Developers had the choice to develop for Mojo and hit the majority of devices, or blindly put their faith in Enyo and hope that someday HP/Palm would put out a decent device capable of running Enyo. But by this time nobody believed a word HP said... they had lost the trust of their own loyal fanbase. Eventually the Pre 3 and Touchpad came but by then the developers had left in droves. I bought a Pre 3 and the hardware was finally decent, but the OS was buggy and there were even fewer apps available for it than for the previous generation Pre and Pre 2. I sold it immediately.
The sell-out to HP could have given Palm the resources they needed to push WebOS but it turned Palm from a nimble company capable of doing some cool stuff into a massive lumbering mess with no clearly defined plans. The signs of the downfall were obvious - the good talent that Palm had hired left almost immediately leaving a skill vacuum at HP/Palm. HP needed to act quickly but they failed to do so. And we all saw the shambolic mess they made of the touchpad launch and subsequent fire sale. Open sourcing WebOS is meaningless because it is a failed project with very little interest except a small (and highly loyal) fan base at WebOS internals. Even those guys must be wondering why they bothered.
The only good thing to come of this is that I got a touchpad for £130 that now runs ICS very nicely. It's a great shame to see the Palm name die in such a catastrophic manner. HP should be ashamed of themselves. And one last thing... throughout all this I have often wondered what happened to Jon Rubinstein? Has he been paid off to keep quiet? I would imagine he is none too happy with the way things turned out but his silence is deafening.
Forgot to ask - what license will Open WebOS be released under?
is clever, but I now would prefer a single broswer with tabbed pages.
I agree with the people who think that if HP could make money on OS, they would and it would not be released under an OSS agreement.
I also remember reading on SD a few weeks ago that the HP employees who built said WebOS was a dead end because they based it on some technology that would not handle heavier loads well.
Agreed on all points, but I think HP deserves kudos.
HP could have just locked the WebOS in a drawer, the way many companies do. Instead they are releasing it, which gives people who *might* get something out of it the opportunity.
That's HP's plan over the next year:
Make webOS as open as possible to other hardware.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
With all those patches you mention (and a few others) my Touchpad is every bit as responsive as any iPad I have held and used.
The WebOS interface is MUCH better than that of iOS and Android; multi-tasking ALONE is a huge benefit to the platform.
My Touchpad has been great to me, and the fact that I could get it for $99 is icing on the cake. I love the fact that WebOS has gone open source, now maybe we'll start to see more hardware and more apps!
it's not necessarily too late.
Specially, when you think about it: despite its market success, android is a little bit outdated. It is Linux based. But its not a full featured linux system under the hood. Instead it's a non standard kernel + a special Java-like user space.
Under the hood it looks more like a feature-phone's system on steroid rather than a pocket internet linux machine, although manufacturer tend to polish it very nicely.
On the long-term, this non-standard stack could come bite you back later in the platform life.
There is market for a "better android". Something to become the "next-gen android". (With a full Linux stack underneath).
- Maemo could have become that (it is a full Linux, with some telephony support), except that after several change and a drop of support of Nokia (when they suddenly became a Microsoft-only shop) the platform isn't really going.
- Ubuntu has plans for tablets and smartphones. But, they are plans. We still have to see how it rolls out.
- OpenMoko is mostly dead and has a too small community. Some interesting *technologies* can come out, but not much.
in this context, webOS could be an interesting alternative :
- it's a full Linux under the hood.
- it has what lot of people find the best multi-tasking GUI for a phone.
- it's open source, meaning that it can be modified.
I don't think mean that manufacturer are going to switch from android to any other over night.
I mean that some parts of webOS could start to show up in android, helping it evolve from "Linux + Java-like userspace" to Linux + a full userspace that also features a nice GUI and can run Java-like android applications.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm not sure I'm understanding the question, here. Do you mean could it be included with Android? Absolutely - the license allows that, though I'm not sure what advantage shipping a version of Enyo with an Android distribution would be. It'd likely be out of date fairly rapidly.
If your question was more along the lines of "will Enyo apps run on Android", then the answer is it depends a bit on what version of Android - there are some significant bugs with some Android browsers That said, the intent is for Enyo 2.0 to be compatible with as many web browsers as possible.