HP To Open Source WebOS

Well, that's nice .. but by ackthpt · 2012-01-25 11:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yet another large open source project to further tax the talent pool? I wonder how much attention it will get.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar

Re:Well, that's nice .. but by SeximusMaximus · 2012-01-25 11:37 · Score: 2

So you don't want more things opened up - seems counter intuitive?
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by Daniel_Staal · 2012-01-25 11:42 · Score: 4, Interesting

Probably not much, really. But it had some nice things, and is also based on a Linux core. So, hopefully, there will be some cross-polination with Android.
If my Pre was still working, I'd probably still be running it. I'd miss a couple of apps from Android, but overall I prefer the Pre. But there's nothing that couldn't be moved/implemented in Android, if the licensing problems are out of the way.

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'Sensible' is a curse word.
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by Microlith · 2012-01-25 11:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

But it had some nice things, and is also based on a Linux core. So, hopefully, there will be some cross-polination with Android.
Android is so insular I don't expect anything to make the leap. The webOS core was so close to a common Linux platform (sdl, glibc, etc.) that games transplanted relatively easily to Maemo. If anything, you could see some cross pollination with initiatives like Mer or Tizen, once Samsung and Intel get that off the ground.
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by tomhudson · 2012-01-25 11:57 · Score: 2, Insightful

Yet another large open source project to further tax the talent pool? I wonder how much attention it will get.

From devs? None - HP is open-sourcing it because it's DEAD.
From everyone else? We need a good laugh (or cry) now and then ...
If HP could make a nickel out of it, or find a buyer for it, they would.
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by rbmyers · 2012-01-25 11:57 · Score: 1

One has the sinking feeling that the window is closing on open source. There are fewer incentives to contribute and enormous incentives to create intellectual property, which is all that interests venture capitalists.
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by ackthpt · 2012-01-25 12:06 · Score: 1

One has the sinking feeling that the window is closing on open source. There are fewer incentives to contribute and enormous incentives to create intellectual property, which is all that interests venture capitalists.
It isn't that, it's yet-another-operating system. I'm sure it has some nice features, which people would like to incorporate into other enviroments, but how much have you heard about BeOS lately? It largely ran out of gas about 10 years back.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by somersault · 2012-01-25 12:12 · Score: 4, Informative

Good thing some of us like to actually do things for fun every now and then. The Open Source philosophy isn't about making money, it's about sharing knowledge.

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which is totally what she said
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by hey! · 2012-01-25 13:31 · Score: 4, Insightful

And exactly how is the talent pool ever supposed to expand without a few blue water projects where a ambitious young developer can go out win himself some glory, instead of having his patches being sneered at by the old boys club?

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Re:Well, that's nice .. but by SuiteSisterMary · 2012-01-25 13:34 · Score: 2

Ah yes. Open Source: The freedom to use what we tell you to use. Sorry, Bazaar's full.

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Re:Well, that's nice .. but by the+linux+geek · 2012-01-25 14:16 · Score: 1

What other open-source, open-development mobile OS is there? Android is just regular code dumps from Google and Tizen barely exists...
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by phantomfive · 2012-01-25 14:43 · Score: 1

There are plenty of people out there who might be interested in working on it. To understand how big the open source talent pool is, check out this page of people who made their own OS (more or less). Open source doesn't lack developers, think how many Windows Managers there are, and those take a lot of effort. It lacks people who know how to put polish on a product.

If the processes and government of WebOS are more open than Android, it may well gather more developers than Android. That is the true democracy of the marketplace of ideas.

Or maybe HP will release it 'open' with some restrictive license. Then wonder why everyone ignores them.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by dgatwood · 2012-01-25 18:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

Good thing some of us like to actually do things for fun every now and then. The Open Source philosophy isn't about making money, it's about sharing knowledge.
No disagreement. That's certainly why I write open source. That and because I need to get things done anyway, so I might as well make it available in case it can help somebody else.
That said (and I'm probably going to get modded down for this), this is also one of the reasons why there is so much open source software out there that is of lesser quality than similar commercial software. Make no mistake, there are plenty of great open source apps and drivers and kernels and daemons out there, but for every one that's a gem, there are a hundred more that are so-so, and a thousand more that are complete crap. The reason for this is, to a large extent, because most of the folks working on it are creating things for fun, for themselves, whatever, and when they get things working well enough to do the job, they do no further work on the project. The result is a whole truckload of abandonware.
More importantly, because the developers often just need to get something working well enough to get something done, maintainability is often the last thing on their minds, resulting in some incredibly bad code. I've seen copious amounts of code in fairly significant open source projects over the years that was so bad, it made me want to cry.
I actually had such an experience just a couple of days ago (on a project that will remain nameless), with code that pre-defined macros for things like SIZEOF_LONG instead of just doing sizeof(long), resulting in the absolute inability to do single-pass compilation of multi-architecture (fat) binaries until I ripped all that crap out. I would have understood that sort of thing ten years ago, but this was top-of-tree in their git repo. Apparently nobody told these developers that there is exactly zero runtime penalty to using sizeof(), and thus absolutely no good reason to predefine macros with hard-coded sizes.... *sigh*
Of course, these sorts of problems occur in the commercial world as well, but the abandonware is more common in the open source world, largely because the barriers to entry are so much lower. You don't have to hire a team of ten people to develop an open source tool—you just write it in your spare time—so there's no real financial incentive not to abandon it when you no longer need to use it yourself, and there's no real financial incentive to ensure that the software is portable, maintainable, or extensible.
Admittedly, the abandonware is less catastrophic in the open source world because you can ostensibly fix it yourself, at least up to the point where code rot makes this impractical, but combined with the open source community's apparent disdain for API contracts and backwards compatibility guarantees, code rot hits open source a lot faster than closed source, which counteracts much of that benefit after only a few years. Just last week, I encountered some fairly fundamental API breakage while updating software written only about a year or two ago, to the point that it required some serious backporting to make things even compile—the function name was the same, but with a very different list of parameters, data types, etc. That's just unacceptable, and leads to serious long-term maintainability problems for anyone who isn't willing to constantly live on the bleeding edge of everything.
And then, there's the general sloppiness of data types. Good code doesn't use types like int or long most of the time, because you can't rely on their sizes. That's why we have inttypes.h. No code that has been touched in the past five years should be using those data types, period, because the results are simply not portable. Yet as recently as a few days ago, I ran into "assert(sizeof(long) == sizeof(uint32_t));". Not even a compile-time failure. A runtime failure. Like I said, some of th

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Re:Well, that's nice .. but by dutchd00d · 2012-01-25 21:04 · Score: 2

I wonder how much attention it will get.
Realistically? None. But the alternative is that HP sticks the whole project on a tape, plasters it with copyright notices and lets is rot for ever more in a vault somewhere. So good for them for open sourcing it.
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by unixisc · 2012-01-25 22:31 · Score: 1
The good thing here is that it's competition for Android. Previously, some people were uneasy about the delay in the source code being made available, although that's finally happened. But now, w/ Open WebOS FOSS, Android would need good reasons for not opening up, since people could turn to WebOS if Android doesn't satisfy them.
I don't think it'll necessarily tax the talent pool, since both are Linux - unless there is a major difference in the dev toolkit used to make Android apps vs WebOS apps. Good thing is that third party tablet makers will have the choice of Android or WebOS while determining how to differentiate their products. WebOS could well get to #3 this way - ahead of RIM and Windows 8 on ARM, and no longer be dependent on a fickle HP.
So, in terms of platforms, now we have, aside from iOS
- Android
- WebOS
- Ubuntu tablets
- Other Linux or BSD?
- RIM/QNX
- Windows 8
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by unixisc · 2012-01-25 22:34 · Score: 2

WebOS ain't BeOS. BeOS was an OS developed from scratch, whereas WebOS is a Linux distro.
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by somersault · 2012-01-25 23:10 · Score: 1

Sarcasm does not become you, AC.

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which is totally what she said
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by UpnAtom · 2012-01-26 01:33 · Score: 1

Maemo and Meego are still going strong.
http://talk.maemo.org/index.php
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by makomk · 2012-01-26 02:47 · Score: 1

Yet as recently as a few days ago, I ran into "assert(sizeof(long) == sizeof(uint32_t));". Not even a compile-time failure. A runtime failure. Like I said, some of the worst code I've ever seen comes from open source projects. Pulling that kind of crap often enough will get you fired in any company with a code review policy.
Compare the amount of commercial software available in 64-bit versions with the amount of open source software that is. Now take a look at when it became available in 64-bit versions. Finally, look at all the companies out there whose software really needs a 64-bit release but who have mysteriously been dragging their feet.
Commercial code is obviously in general a lot worse than you're making out. Hell, for the longest time the last major 32-bit-only holdout in the open source world was OpenOffice, mostly because of the legacy of really awful code from its time as commercial software. There's no commercial incentive to do it right - that costs money and the benefits are long-term if they're ever seen at all, by which time the CEO and CTO will have exercised their options for a nice bonus and moved elsewhere.
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by somersault · 2012-01-26 04:24 · Score: 1

I take it by this that you mean you usually have to pay if you want to have sex with women, whereas in jail you got it for free?

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which is totally what she said
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by arkane1234 · 2012-01-26 04:25 · Score: 1

Nah, it's just that a majority of the lower level stuff has already been done, so now it's larger scale product code being created. Just seems slow because I'd that.

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Re:Well, that's nice .. but by gregben · 2012-01-26 04:32 · Score: 1

How about writing up a tutorial on how to correctly declare
c/c++ numeric variables. When I went to school many moons
ago, int and long were it.
http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/variables/
has a tutorial on declaring variables, and a table listing sizes.
They state the sizes of char, short int, int, long, etc.
If this is not the correct way to do it, please help enlighten us!
Thank you.
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by unixisc · 2012-01-26 05:10 · Score: 1

If all the people who spun their own distros focussed instead on writing drivers and adding polish to the ones that already exist, so that things like installation dependencies, malfunctioning drivers and so on were eliminated, FOSS would be a lot more solid platform. It wouldn't be reduced to one, but at the same time, you wouldn't have hundreds. You'd have a handful of distros, DEs, UXs, WMs and a few software titles in every category (Office, Multimedia, Internet, Graphics, Development and so on) that would work seamlessly w/ every combination & permutation.
In other words, everything would be working more or less smoothly, and people wouldn't be saying that this ALSA driver doesn't work w/ kernel x and library y, or that this software title pukes under Gnome, or I can't use WindowMaker's utilities to change my network configuration settings & so on w/o going to /etc and tampering w/ them. That would be a lot more functional than just forking something whenever a software doesn't have one's pet features.
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by phantomfive · 2012-01-26 05:12 · Score: 1

Yes. Interface stability is essential.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Well, that's nice .. but by dgatwood · 2012-01-26 06:50 · Score: 1

The big difference is that I don't have to build the commercial software in order to use it. They can distribute binaries because they build binary backwards compatibility into their library/framework/OS design so that as long as you keep calling the same function with the same name, you'll keep getting the same behavior.
By contrast, with open source, binary distributions are often few and far between, and even if they exist, a binary linked against an old version of a library won't run against a newer version or vice-versa because the designers don't treat headers as a long-term API contract. Suddenly, the function call used to perform a critical operation takes nine parameters instead of seven, and even though the two new parameters can be NULL, you still get to patch the code by hand before the code will build.
The result is that the 32-bit commercial app still works, albeit slowly and clumsily, on a 64-bit system (because most OSes can support both 64-bit and 32-bit binaries on the same system). The 32-bit open source app requires to you monkey around with makefiles for an hour just to convince it to build using the 32-bit compiler, after which you get to back-port all the calls to libraries whose interfaces changed.
No, the commercial software world generally does not have problems on that order of magnitude. Maybe the worst of the worst, but 99% of my commercial software form 5 years ago still runs correctly. Much of the open source software I've downloaded from five years ago won't even compile, much less run, because of the sheer number of incompatible API changes.

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Re:Well, that's nice .. but by wed128 · 2012-01-26 07:13 · Score: 1

There's nothing inherantly wrong with using int and long etc... but when you're depending on a rollover or have some reason that the size of a variable is important, it's much more portable to use uint8_t, uint16_t, etc. The c99 fixed size integral types were invented for a reason. they help architectural portability.

Where's the beef? by jpwilliams · 2012-01-25 11:40 · Score: 2, Insightful

Why would a developer work on this when there are other, more widely adopted platforms to develop on?

Re:Where's the beef? by oodaloop · 2012-01-25 11:45 · Score: 1, Insightful

Listen buddy, the egg came first. That's where the chicken came from, OK?

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Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Re:Where's the beef? by Microlith · 2012-01-25 11:56 · Score: 2

Why would a developer work on this when there are other, more widely adopted platforms to develop on?
I know, why would anyone ever challenge an incumbent?
Re:Where's the beef? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-25 11:59 · Score: 1

Because "widely adopted" is a moving target. RIM was a huge market player at one point, as was Palm. Same thing can happen to Android and ios. Maybe people will get tired of privacy violations via Google or price gouging via Apple. No one really knows.
Having a true Linux core ain't bad though. Linux pretty much just refuses to die. So webos at least has that going for it.
Re:Where's the beef? by bogaboga · 2012-01-25 12:02 · Score: 2

Hey dude,
Some eggs are diseased. Others never hatch! WebOS is one of the two. Pick one.
Re:Where's the beef? by amRadioHed · 2012-01-25 12:21 · Score: 1

Because "widely adopted" is a moving target. RIM was a huge market player at one point, as was Palm. Same thing can happen to Android and ios. Maybe people will get tired of privacy violations via Google....
If Android uses got tired of Google's influence on Android, that is still no motive to move to iOS. There are already plenty of popular Android releases based on Android Open Source Project which give you total control over how much Google is in your phone.

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Re:Where's the beef? by poity · 2012-01-25 14:59 · Score: 1

Is it really that hard to port to WebOS? Besides, WebOS users are starving for good apps, so it's a good opportunity to carve out a niche. Settling into a good niche is often more profitable than squabbling with the big boys.

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your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Re:Where's the beef? by Rossman · 2012-01-25 15:54 · Score: 1

If its faster and better than whatever out there, why not give it a shot?
From what I understand the mobile js frameworks out there so far still leave a lot to be desired.
Re:Where's the beef? by grcumb · 2012-01-25 16:03 · Score: 2

Why would a developer work on this when there are other, more widely adopted platforms to develop on?
Ask Linus why he didn't just stick with Minix or SCO Unix, or bloody well install Windows on his 386.
Some people are just perversely obstinate about wanting to have things exactly thus and so. Some people don't give a damn whether what they're doing will be popular or not; they just want things to work their way. We call those people geeks.

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Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Re:Where's the beef? by Astronomerguy · 2012-01-25 16:08 · Score: 1

Gee...lets take that logic to the hackneyed metaphor of...the automobile! "Why would anyone want to work on an Aston Martin Coupe when the minivan or the Reliant "K" car is in such wide use?" Get it now? No? Then let me spell it out in small words for ya: "Widely adopted" i.e Windows, OS/X etc does not always equate to the best. See "'reality' TV". Does that help a teensy-weensy bit...?
Re:Where's the beef? by CAIMLAS · 2012-01-25 16:09 · Score: 1

Why not?
Cases in point:
* Mint Linux
* lighttpd
* memtest86+
* KVM
* OpenNebula
* Android
And lest we not forget:
* Linux
* FreeBSD
And so on and so forth. Options are good. If nobody stepped out into the street, sure - nobody would get hit by the a bus. But then, nobody would cross the street, either (except at approved crosswalks).

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Re:Where's the beef? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-25 18:35 · Score: 1

It really was just an example. People can choose to quit using something for any number of reasons, a lot which would seem absurd to experienced users like yourself. While you and other slashdot users might flash a new OS, most people will throw it in the trash and buy a competitor.
My point was that OP's "keep the status quo!" argument is largely moot. To suggest that someone shouldn't be writing for a "dead system" is a little douchebaggy. Tech writers are paid to write stuff like that. Users should know better. We've seen dead systems become dominant systems.
Re:Where's the beef? by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-01-26 06:57 · Score: 1

Because he purchased an HP Touchpad when it was on sale for $99?

Enyo information is at enyojs.com by mbessey · 2012-01-25 11:42 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

Re:Enyo information is at enyojs.com by wed128 · 2012-01-26 07:19 · Score: 1

Any chance that this javascript framework could make it into other packages, such as mozilla or even android?
Will WebOS be cannibalized for parts?

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-25 11:42 · Score: 1

If by "fair" you mean completely off-topic and obvious troll, then yes, yes it is.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by oodaloop · 2012-01-25 11:43 · Score: 5, Funny

What a strange sig, considering you not only replied to but agreed with an AC.

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Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-25 11:53 · Score: 1

def greatbunzinni() if $target != $my_opinion and get_rating($target) > -1 then call conspiracy_accusation() end return

Late by amiga3D · 2012-01-25 12:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

If they had done this from the start I believe they would have fared much better.

Re:Late by tomhudson · 2012-01-25 12:23 · Score: 4, Funny

If they had done this from the start I believe they would have fared much better.

This is HP we're talking about. The US version of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot RIM.
Re:Late by jd2112 · 2012-01-25 14:16 · Score: 2

If they had done this from the start I believe they would have fared much better.
This is HP we're talking about. The US version of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot RIM.
And HP CEOs trend to be as incompetent as both RIM CEOs put together.

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Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Re:Late by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-25 16:29 · Score: 1

Unfair. RIM's CEOs are not incompetent: for quite a few years they developed a company that was game-changing. Ok, so they couldn't hold up to actual change speed and competition, and needed to be replaced, but that -at the least- is a sign of wisdom, not incompetence.
Re:Late by tomhudson · 2012-01-25 17:30 · Score: 1

Did you see the lame replacement for CEO at RIM? As inspiring as 2-week-old lettuce. This is not a leader - not when you know the world, your employees, and your partners are watching. Even Monkeyboy knows that you've got to look like you have enough of a pulse to fog a mirror.

Re:Slashdot to Open Source DupeOS by spiderbitendeath · 2012-01-25 12:05 · Score: 5, Informative

HP announced they were open sourcing it last month, which it says in the summary. It doesn't explain well that HP today laid out their plans, with release dates, for a complete open source webOS. As well as released the Enyo framework, across multiple platforms. Already seeing apps running in browsers and on Android based on it. Today is the actual start of them opening up the source on things. http://precentral.net/ - Multiple articles up today detailing everything that was released today.

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Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by flimflammer · 2012-01-25 12:45 · Score: 1

Thanks for confirming you were the original AC. Not that it was particularly difficult to see in the first place.

Comments in every topic now. by flimflammer · 2012-01-25 12:50 · Score: 1, Offtopic

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?

Re:Comments in every topic now. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-25 14:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

They do ot so the mods will waste their points. Then they come back later to lay down the anti-open source 'turf with impunity. Oldest waggener edstrom trick in the book.

Everyone is complaining on how this is doomed... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-25 12:52 · Score: 1

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.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by JonySuede · 2012-01-25 13:02 · Score: 2

no it's not !
I like the customization potential and the low cost that the generic PC provide to the experimented admins and power-users..

Annecdote:
I built an HTPC in a wodden case with spare part laying around my house. It is totally wife approved and it would be impossible to achieve that level of customization without jail-breaking an iThing. Spare parts, a licence I got at a random conf, XBMC, a few plugins I customized and a bunch of AutoIt scripts was all that was needed in the generic PC world.

Cost :
- 0$ as it was made of spare parts and spare woods...
- a weekend to have it working perfectly to my wife taste
Benefit:
- hacking is fun when work is :meeting,telephone,meeting,Visio,meeting,IM,email, a snippet of code, goto meeting
- an happy wife

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Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected

Re:Slashdot is dead by mbkennel · 2012-01-25 13:06 · Score: 1, Offtopic

"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!""

It was the bundling it with Windows and concomitant development of proprietary MS only extensions that were the real problems.

Google (so far) isn't doing the rough equivalents: they aren't restricting use of Google search to Chrome, and they aren't pushing a plethora of obviously Google-only APIs to make websites work on Chrome-only. If they did, then they'd be like Microsoft 1998.

They're making Chrome so that they can make and sell Google Apps and be sure that there will be a way to run Google Apps which doesn't suck too much.

Of course, Google is mini-evil to meso-evil (on the scale where Facebook is full-on-evil) on privacy and creepy data collection.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by anonymov · 2012-01-25 13:28 · Score: 1

Oh my, how optimistic. You're totally not mistaking sales growth with installed base share.

There's a billion or so PCs in the world with about 5% of them being Macs. With about 12 million Macs sold last year, it'll take just ~80 years to completely replace the PC - and that's if ~300 millions PC sales suddenly disappear.

Also note that it's not like decline in new sales means people throw PCs out of the window to replace them with Mac.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by JonySuede · 2012-01-25 13:36 · Score: 1

But I dont want other people junk, I want to make my own ! ;)

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Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected

meh, wrong link by anonymov · 2012-01-25 13:38 · Score: 1

Meant to paste this one.

Open Source support already exists by James+McP · 2012-01-25 13:44 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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Re:Open Source support already exists by WiiVault · 2012-01-25 16:20 · Score: 1

Right on man. WebOS is really a huge opportunity for those who want OSS without a monolith like Google (or Apple) to run the show
Re:Open Source support already exists by unixisc · 2012-01-25 22:35 · Score: 1

Maybe, but the monolith is what makes it successful.
Re:Open Source support already exists by ChunderDownunder · 2012-01-26 03:16 · Score: 1

Today's announcement should be welcomed by web developers.
Enyo is supposed to be fairly bleeding edge in terms of being a web toolkit optimised for touch-screen devices that yet can scale up to a standard browser. Whether that makes it a better choice for development than, say, RoR/JSF or whichever Java web framework of the month, is another matter.
While webos may have failed to gain market share overall, it could live on as components. RIM's playbook, Samsung's bada and Tizen are all based around the HTML5 UI (with native support). Enyo could be that killer HTML layer!

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by Hognoxious · 2012-01-25 14:04 · Score: 1

As an Apple fan I guess you've seen a lot of people's "junk", and plenty of "parts hanging around".

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Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by anonymov · 2012-01-25 14:27 · Score: 1

You're right I'm not mistaking it. I explicitly said unit sales growth and that's what I meant. Also known as market share.

You explicitly said:

It's good to see (mostly Windows) PCs on their way out, replaced by Macs.

To say "PC is on the way out" you need to compare not sales and market share, but install base. That's why I said you're mistaken.

Yeah right. Because those PCs will still be running in 80 years. And suddenly the growth in Mac unit sales is going to stop.

No, they will extrapolate indefinitely and in some ten years there will be 1 bln. Macs sold annually. PC sales, on the other hand, will continue the negative growth and soon PC vendors will start taking computers away.

Windows PC desktop might be on its way out, though it's still not somewhere in the near future, but it surely won't be replaced by Macs. Even "Soon everyone will throw away PC and buy a tablet" (note the "a") sounds more reasonable than this.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by hairyfeet · 2012-01-25 14:27 · Score: 2

Actually I think you're wrong, and here is why: Most PCs have gotten "good enough" so people simply aren't buying new ones. that Pentium D or Athlon X2 they bought in 06 is still fine for webmail, YouTube, and FB, which is what the majority are doing so they simply aren't buying because compared to the jobs they have their current PCs are insanely overpowered. hell i sold my full size laptop and bought an E-350 netbook, could i have afforded bigger? Not a problem but i realized that my laptop was twiddling its thumbs a good 90% of the time so what's the point?

The Macs are selling on the other hand because they finally started selling some of them below the $1000 price point. I'd love to see the numbers broken down by price as i'd bet my last buck the vast majority of OSX's gains are below $1000 units. In a way its the same thing we are seeing with tablets now, where many that would have bought one were turned off by the price but now we are seeing all these nice sub $250 Android tablets the sales are climbing, same thing. those that held off because they couldn't see paying $2k+ for a Mac are jumping on now that the price has dropped and i expect you'll see this continue for probably a year until those that wanted one have one then the sales will drop again.

Funnily enough that'll be about the time you'll see Windows PCs jump like mad thanks to the "great XP dieoff" reaching a head. Right now most shops will tell you its just a trickle but as it gets closer to Apr 2014 that trickle will become a flood as all those people that thought their current PC was 'good enough" decide they'd rather buy a new one than pay to upgrade their old. the first to go were the late model P4s but now the early Pentium Ds and Athlon X2s are starting to make an appearance, can't way for the early core duo laptops to start showing up.

As for WebOS, stick a fork she be done. cell phones simply aren't like desktops, you can just stick any old thing on there and get it to work as all the drivers are proprietary and the network is locked down. while i liked the UI of WebOS without OEMs actually supplying drivers and handsets for it to run on i don't see it going anywhere and HP drug its feet and killed most of the buzz. final prediction? in less than 2 years it'll be another abandoned project on SourceForge.

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Re:Slashdot is dead by hairyfeet · 2012-01-25 14:31 · Score: 1, Troll

No they are just spamming the living shit out of the thing by paying every freeware author and his cat and his cat's squeaky toy to include Chrome in the installer with default checked. i don't know how many Chrome "infections' I've had to clean in the past 6 months because of that shit but frankly its getting old. i didn't like it when it was sun spamming java, didn't like it when it was MSFT spamming bingBar, don't like it now that its Google spamming Chrome. spam is spam is spam and it sucks.

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Re:Everyone is complaining on how this is doomed.. by Ol+Olsoc · 2012-01-25 14:56 · Score: 1

I got one of the Touchpads on sale with a HP laptop. This is a good machine, and the updates have taken care of the complaints that people have lodged against it. Only thing is it's a fingerprint magnet on the back side. Big deal.

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.

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Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by anonymov · 2012-01-25 15:40 · Score: 1

Where the hell do you get those numbers? Down there is AC with a Gartner link, check it.

There's 90M PCs shipped in Q4'11, 5M - or 5.5% - of those are Macs. Now if you include 15M iPads (and exclude Android tablets), yeah, you'll get ~20% market share Q4'11. Clearly shows Wintel desktop is dead, yup. Mere 80%.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by justforgetme · 2012-01-25 18:07 · Score: 1

Error: Ambiguous goto label: "meeting" program trace (nearest first) 1: goto meeting ________^ 2:a snippet of code 3:email 4:IM 5:meeting (output truncated)
Watch what you type people, there are puppies at stake!

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Not really an issue by LostMyBeaver · 2012-01-25 19:44 · Score: 1

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.

Re:Slashdot is dead by mwvdlee · 2012-01-25 20:33 · Score: 1

Quite an interresting point about WebOS you make there.

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Hardware support by mwvdlee · 2012-01-25 20:49 · Score: 2

Besides the tablets no longer sold, is there any hardware that can run WebOS?

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Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by semi-extrinsic · 2012-01-25 21:41 · Score: 1

Well we can get the average price is easy enough. Divide Mac revenue by units in the Apple results. Answer $1282.

Hi. I think you need to understand the concept of the median. Statistics 101 is not a bad idea. Also, outliers is the fancy name for those $3k Apple workstations that people working in movie-editing buy, which are causing your distribution to be skewed.

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Too little too late by bluec · 2012-01-25 21:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

License? by unixisc · 2012-01-25 22:32 · Score: 1

Forgot to ask - what license will Open WebOS be released under?

Re:License? by IHateEverybody · 2012-01-27 08:10 · Score: 1

Forgot to ask - what license will Open WebOS be released under?
Apache

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Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by DrXym · 2012-01-25 23:58 · Score: 2

But people aren't buying those sub-$250 tablets. They're buying $500 iPads.

Well clearly they are or they wouldn't be on sale in dozens of form factors and price points from generic no-name chinese models, to Amazon Kindle / B&N Nook tablets and pushing upwards through $250 to Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Samsung tablets. One of the advantages of Android is that it doesn't dictate the price, features, form factor, quality, storage or anything else that a tablet running it has. That means tablets to suit all tastes and pockets and it is reflected in sales with some people buying a cheap tablet and others buying a more expensive tablet, either an iPad or one of the more prominent Android based models.

Indeed tablet sales for the last 3 months of 2011 were 57% iPad and 43% other, mostly Android. 57% is still a formidable amount but it's dropping substantially in much the same way as happened with phones. I expect the market share will continue to drop for Apple regardless of what comes out this year.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by Astronomerguy · 2012-01-26 00:32 · Score: 1

Are you saying that tablets are replacing PC's? That every tablet sold is a PC not purchased? Seriously? for 99.9% of consumer/business use, a tablet is a convenient accessory to a PC. Great for media consumption. Now go ahead and try and do some serious work. Coding? Photo editing? Movie Editing? Writing a long document or complex report? Et al ad nauseum. FWIW, I have a Touchpad, my wife has a shiny new iPad, and I have a custom-built-by-me enthusiast PC and a loaded laptop. The tablet has it's role: convenient web surfing, music, recipe file etc.

Card swiping by ThatsNotPudding · 2012-01-26 00:52 · Score: 1

is clever, but I now would prefer a single broswer with tabbed pages.

A Good Move by assertation · 2012-01-26 02:21 · Score: 1

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.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by BasilBrush · 2012-01-26 02:28 · Score: 1

Are you saying that tablets are replacing PC's? That every tablet sold is a PC not purchased?

No but it's certainly sometimes a laptop not bought. And sales figures of netbooks falling off a cliff suggest people who would otherwise have bought a netbook are buying an iPad instead.

Now go ahead and try and do some serious work. Coding? Photo editing? Movie Editing?

Most people aren't doing those things. They come home from a hard days work, and the computer is just there for easy leisure, the odd bit of information retrieval, a bit of social networking, just like their PC was.

The tablet has it's role: convenient web surfing, music, recipe file etc.

Exactly.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by BasilBrush · 2012-01-26 02:38 · Score: 1

Hi. I think you need to understand the concept of the median. Statistics 101 is not a bad idea.

I know perfectly well what the median is. You obviously need to learn about company results if you think that it's something we can work out. I gave the average (the mean) because that is the ONLY gauge we can get from the results to give an idea what type of Macs are selling.

It's interesting information. Your post was pointless.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by BasilBrush · 2012-01-26 02:56 · Score: 1

Well clearly they are or they wouldn't be on sale in dozens of form factors and price points from generic no-name chinese models, to Amazon Kindle / B&N Nook tablets and pushing upwards through $250 to Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Samsung tablets.

Those same manufacturers were trying to sell dozens of models of Netbook previously. They didn't sell well either.

Indeed tablet sales for the last 3 months of 2011 were 57% iPad and 43% other, mostly Android.

39% of them are Android. And by no means are most of them $250.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by prezkennedy.org · 2012-01-26 03:17 · Score: 1

Well when Apple charges $400 for a 1TB hard drive, they must be the "best".

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That's the plan by DrYak · 2012-01-26 03:29 · Score: 1

That's HP's plan over the next year:
Make webOS as open as possible to other hardware.

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Re:That's the plan by ChunderDownunder · 2012-01-26 06:07 · Score: 1

To reach critical mass, running webOS on existing Android devices would be a start. Many Android vendors are now promising to ship with unlocked boatloaders. Is HP willing to support a cyanogenmod like community?
HP needs to bite the bullet and state its hardware intentions. So long as it only targets existing discontinued devices it will remain on life support as just another obscure Linux distro running on proprietary hardware, cf. Maemo.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by BasilBrush · 2012-01-26 03:42 · Score: 1

Apple charges $150 for a 1TB drive.

Not necessarily. We need an after-android by DrYak · 2012-01-26 04:33 · Score: 1

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.

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Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by PoopCat · 2012-01-26 04:57 · Score: 1

"Not taking credit for" != "I was not the original author". You win this week's doublespeak award!

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android by PoopCat · 2012-01-26 04:59 · Score: 1

So you're saying Apple won't be the best until they charge $400 for a 1TB hard drive? Good to know.

Enyo 2.0 is designed to be cross-platform by mbessey · 2012-01-26 08:46 · Score: 1

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.

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