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."

Comments

Well, that's nice .. but

[ackthpt]

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

Re:Well, that's nice .. but

[SeximusMaximus]

So you don't want more things opened up - seems counter intuitive?

Re:Well, that's nice .. but

[Daniel_Staal]

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.

Re:Well, that's nice .. but

[Microlith]

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

[tomhudson]

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

[somersault]

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.

Re:Well, that's nice .. but

[hey!]

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?

Re:Well, that's nice .. but

[SuiteSisterMary]

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

Re:Well, that's nice .. but

[dgatwood]

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

Re:Well, that's nice .. but

[dutchd00d]

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

[unixisc]

WebOS ain't BeOS. BeOS was an OS developed from scratch, whereas WebOS is a Linux distro.

Where's the beef?

[jpwilliams]

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

Re:Where's the beef?

[Microlith]

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?

[bogaboga]

Hey dude,

Some eggs are diseased. Others never hatch! WebOS is one of the two. Pick one.

Re:Where's the beef?

[grcumb]

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.

Enyo information is at enyojs.com

[mbessey]

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:iOS now has more marketshare than Android

[oodaloop]

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

Late

[amiga3D]

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

Re:Late

[tomhudson]

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

[jd2112]

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.

Re:Slashdot to Open Source DupeOS

[spiderbitendeath]

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.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android

[JonySuede]

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

Open Source support already exists

[James McP]

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.

Re:Comments in every topic now.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android

[hairyfeet]

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.

Hardware support

[mwvdlee]

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

Too little too late

[bluec]

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.

Re:iOS now has more marketshare than Android

[DrXym]

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.