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HP Cuts Staff As WebOS Transitions To Opensource
alphadogg writes "Hewlett-Packard has cut 275 jobs in its webOS group, as part of its strategy to turn the operating system over to the open-source community, according to IDG News Service. HP said last year that it would stop making devices that use the operating system which was developed by Palm for phones and tablets, and later decided to release the software under the Apache License 2.0. As webOS continues the transition to open-source software, HP no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before, the company said in a statement. 'This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well-equipped to deliver an open source webOS and sustain HP's commitment to the software over the long term,' it added."
Cursed by poor marketing, weak launch hardware and a limited budget from Palm, Webos never really had a fair shot at the market. HP bought them at a time when they were transitioning to a new CEO who wanted to move them in a services direction, and so they never got the love they needed from HP.
Hopefully open sourcing it will give it new life. It would be nice to have a REAL open source platform, and not the pseudo open source with have with Android, where it's really only open to the handset makers and carriers and users have to resort to ugly hacks to make it work.
I wouldn't mind buying a used Android handset or even an iphone 4S and wiping and re-imaging with Webos. That would be awesome! Finally a good quality OS on good hardware. Kickass.
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I expect that HP would have let those folks go regardless - they had already killed the product.
Further proof that Open Source kills engineering jobs and depresses wages.
It actually seems to cut both ways, albeit one way visibly, the other less visibly.
Given that 'Open Source' is(among other things) the trendy way to put a product on deathwatch, it does have some correlation with job losses. Company X decides to take Product Y out behind the woodshed, kicks out a perfunctory OSS release and then axes the internal dev team.
However, the availability of OSS tools and building blocks of various flavors certainly improves matters for those people who have the skill and experience to make them work together to deliver whatever it is that people actually want. There are plenty of jobs doing the same with proprietary toolsets; but the cost of owning your tools(or even getting a chance to learn hands on) is higher. OSS software creates a nontrivial niche for anybody who can get rid of enough licensing fees in order to justify their salary...
They certainly do have a strategy:
They purchased a Magic 8 ball, gave it a set of stock options that most of their employees could never hope to possess, and now shake it twice daily and execute its instructions to the letter...
Or perhaps - Face-Palm OS :-}
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The article states that many of the positions which are being cut are hardware related (and they are being moved to new positions within HP not being fired). HP still has quite a few folks who are paid to develop WebOS. Put it this way. How many successful OSS projects have over 300 full-time developers? That many people is massive overkill even if you split WebOS into 4 major projects, and a handful of smaller projects.