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LG Acquires WebOS Source Code and Patents From HP
An anonymous reader writes "LG is set to breathe new life into the webOS platform after the company announced today that it has acquired the software and its intellectual property from HP. The news comes after HP abandoned webOS device and software development in August 2011, then open-sourced the platform so that developers might be able to salvage something from the software that was widely acclaimed, despite the lack of smartphone and tablet sales which it powered. LG now claims complete ownership of the webOS source code, its documentation and webOS websites. It has obtained HP licenses, as well as the patents that Palm transferred to its owner when it was acquired in 2010."
HP must be breathing a sigh of relief. I hope LG didn't pay much, because they'll now need to hoard every penny they find.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
How can they open source the code, then flog it to somebody else who claims "complete ownership"? What license did they release the open source branch under?
LG is still alive somewhere
Next week HP will be announcing their acquisition of LG, in order to secure ownership of WebOS which they will see as a vital part of their future growth plans.
LG is still alive somewhere
...its thriving after ditching windows phone, and the Nexus 4 I believe has been [too] sold out since launch.
WebOS is a really good OS. I grabbed one of those HP Touchpads and was very impressed by the OS. But...there aren't any good Apps for it. And I don't see why anyone would want to start writing them. At this point it's basically a two horse race - iOS and Android. It would be nice to see a WebOS update for my Touchpad but I'm not holding my breath.
reverse-engineer all the shiny you want into Bang-n-Whiz all you want after you run off in your own corner with Whizbang 1.5
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
In case of future lawsuits the Palm Patents are pretty strong and very well dated before any iPhone.... Engadget did a pretty good job at looking at just some of the patents...
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs-palm-the-in-depth-analysis/
trust me.. this is big legally and hopefully great for WebOS... it was ahead of it's time and didn't have enough time to mature and have compiled sandboxes for programs.
I'd like to see them bring the Palm name back. It would make my month if they'd also release a new TREO device. I still miss my 650 sometimes with its stylus and keyboard.
The rumor I heard was that they were going to use it in their TVs.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Yeah, LG just acquired all those patents from HP/Palm...
But what did it get? If you imagine each of those patents to be a pie, did LG get the whole pie on each one it got?
Hell no.
First, HP undoubtedly retained a license to practice under each of the patents, to make, use, sell, have made, have customers use, yada, yada, yada.
Next, LG took those patents under whatever licenses and cross-licenses HP (and Palm) had entered into with other companies.
So while LG acquired a bunch of patents, each of those patents has a chunk or two taken out of it. LG undoubtedly didn't get the whole pie.
There's one subbtle difference between then and now:
sometime in between, the wonderful world of "opensource" has happened.
Amiga's wonderful OS was still an old-style of proprietary software, and also heavily depended on some hardware components exclusive to Amiga machine.
Whoever controls the software and the hardware controls Amiga's rekown wonders. If gateway choose to buy Amiga, but then throw it in the garbage and only keep the patent port-folio: all the wonders are lost forever and the platform is dead.
On the other hand, webOS is (unlike Android, but like most other OSes like Meego/Meamo/Tizen, or OpenMoko's FSO, or QTopia, etc.) a full Linux stack. Meaning that most component under the hood are opensource and already available everywhere (most of the "magic" is available to any geek with enough motivation).
Not only that, but HP had even the decency to opensource the latest components of webOS which were proprietary and developed at Palm: openWebOS is out there, fully available.
Even if some of the "wonders" that the Palm/HP Pre family brought out are hardware (the inductive charging TouchStone comes to mind) hardware plays a little role in the whole experience and is independent of the other advantages. webOS was mostly praised for its nice interface (making it easy to do meaningful multi-tasking on a portable device) for its integrative synchronisation mechanism (Synergy can very elegantly mix data from several source: google, facebook, linkedin, etc. and can completly abstract them for the other application: the chat application doesn't give a damn where the message are coming from as long as Synergy has a proper account configured), etc.
All these "gems" are AVAILABLE today in openwebos. If these "wonders" are really worth it, any motivated party can today take over and start playing with them. Unlike Amiga and Gateway, we are not at LG's whim regarding the future of webOS.
So if the community is motivated enough, they can help webOS move forward without any initial corporate backing.
(if you look at it: webOS has currently already been ported to various android devices)
So I'm not personally that much afraid even if LG decides not to use webOS on their phones.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Open webOS is released under Apache License Version 2.0 (http://apache.org/licenses/)
The Apache licence grants you the right to make and distribute copies, but does not require you to distribute the source code with a binary distribution.
So LG can fork the code and that code will probably not be made available, only the binaries. They own the forked code completely. It will live a separate life from Open webOS.
Also, the licence says:
"If You institute patent litigation against any entity( ...) alleging that the Work( ...) constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."
So if LG uses the patents used in webUS against anyone, say Apple, then LG loses the right to use those patents? So LG can't use those patents? That's what is seems to say, but maybe I don't get legal speak.
Rick
assignment != equality != identity
Indeed webOS can benefit a lot from running Android apps. (A whole ecosystem to leverage). And it shouldn't be that much difficult: webOS is almost a complete classical linux stack under the hood (save for the interface) and others, such as Canonical with their iterations of "running Android Apps on Ubuntu" or "running Android and Ubuntu alongside", have proven that Android Apps on a any generic Linux isn't impossible.
Best part?
It's ALREADY happening.
for example: openmobile do have an Android Compatibility Layer.
LG could indeed re-use webOS (specially: they've got the openWebOS community working for them), license openmobile's ACL, and voilÃ, they have a google-free alternative to android, which can also run the same apps and benefit from the same ecosystem, but on the other hand, doesn't depend on google, and offers something different (in order to distiguish themselves from the hundreds of other android smartphone makers. just like HTC is distinguishing themselves with their HTC Sense interface)
Also don't forget that the "other" hot thing currently is HTML5 based applications (Windows 8 is betting a lot on that as a smartphone OS, but Firefox and Chrome have also be showcasing webapps a lot) and webOS has been using web-standards-based applications from DAY 1.
So if the HTML5/Javascript start to gain any traction, webOS is already a first class citizen and a very attractive platform to bet on, being able to tap into 2 different echo-systems (both android and HTML5 apps).
(And given the efforts that Google has invested into ChromeOS and Chromebooks, you can bet that they'll try to push this ecosystem too)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well currently patents are used to fling lawsuits at each other among various smart-phone makers (with Apple being apparently among the most noisy one).
As HP has definitely decided to abandon the idea of producing their own webOS based smartphones, it doesn't matter if LG has full exclusive ownership on the patents, or if HP has retained a right to use them.
There's currently no chance that LG will ever need to be able to use these patents against HP, they are not in the same market.
What matters is that LG has now a patent portfolio with which to answer back to Apple, should they become the victims of the next lawsuite-du-jour.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
One: I don't think they ever fully open sourced every last bit.
Well actually, the "last bit" *IS* the only thing to opensource in webOS.
Unlike Android, but like most other Linux based OSes (Meamo/Meego/Tizen, OpenMoko's FSO, QTopia, etc.) webOS is pretty much a standard Linux stack under the hood, saved for their peculiar stack-of-cards-based user interface, and their account info snychronising system Synergy.
the "last bit" was the only thing setting appart webOS from, say, Ubuntu.
So when webOSt was open sourced into openWebOS, this last bit is what actually got opensourced.
Well, mostly. If you want to nit-pick, webOS uses an unusual closed source stack for Bluetooth. But Linux has a very nice BlueZ stack which work already. I think that replacing the proprietary stack with BlueZ was on openwebos roadmap, although I don't remember how far they got with this point.
Any way, the final openWebOS version 1.0 has been out for a while and with it (roughly) everything you need to make your own webOS device is available as you can see with the various ports to the Google Nexus family of devices.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In theory you're correct:
LG can't control the GPLed copies which are already "in the wild", those will remain GPLed and can still be distributed under this license. LG only decide what they do with their own copy and all future development they do on this.
In practice, there's something to take into account:
Unlike Android, and like any other Linux-based smartphone OS (Meego/Maemo/Tizen, openmoko's FSo and SHR, QTopia, etc.) webOS is pretty much as standart GNU/Linux stack under the hood.
The only proprietary bits is the stack-of-cards-based UI, and Synergy.
Evertything else is the same GPLed components that you already have in your Ubuntu.
So in practice LG doesn't have control over much of the code. Neither they, nor HP, nor Palm own it.
They only have full control over Luna, Enyo and Synergy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Back in the mid-nineties, a company called Gateway bought the assets of a bankrupt Commodore, making fans of the Amiga temporarily very excited thinking that a major PC maker was about to rescue the most innovative personal computer platform. Gateway was doing well, the Amiga's problem was mismanagement, and finally, thought many people, the Amiga might stand a chance of returning to its former glories and lead position. Did that happen? Did it bollocks. Gateway just wanted the patents.
Interesting (and perceptive) comparison. However, in a way that might mirror today's position with WebOS, the fans' hopes were probably blinding them to the fact that- realistically- it was probably too late to save the Amiga market by 1997, even if Gateway had wanted to.
By early 1993, the Amiga (which had been European hobbyists' and gamers' machine of choice in the late 80s and early 90s) was noticably losing ground to cheap clone PCs at the high end, and 16-bit consoles at the other. The "evolution not revolution" A1200 was a catch-up at best. When C= went bankrupt in mid-94, it was no longer dominant and losing mainstream support, then it languished for a year until Escom bought it. They proposed relaunching the near 3-year-old A1200 at £100 *more* than its pre-bankruptcy price (**), and even I knew it was over.
By the time of Gateway's purchase, the Amiga had already been left behind and only serious fans (and the few remaining video professionals who hadn't yet migrated to the PC) were still using it. Windows 95 had long replaced the sub-Amiga Windows 3.1, and the PlayStation had moved gaming on. Gateway would have had to seriously modernise the Amiga hardware to even "keep up" with the 1997 market, and since by that time the format had lost support and dominance it would have had to be *better* than the ruthlessly cheap commodity PC clones to justify choosing.
I suppose they *might* have considered using it as the basis of cheap hardware driving Internet set-top boxes (yeah, I know, but they didn't know those would be a flop back then), but such boxes wouldn't necessarily have been "Amigas". In any case they'd really just have been milking the existing hardware (and probably ditching the OS).
The Amiga *was* mismanaged by Commodore, but the "event horizon" for coming back from that was probably well over five years before Gateway took over.
Perhaps- over a shorter timescale- this reflects the situation with WebOS; the battle is already lost, the fans just can't see it?
(*) I remember this shift because I bought an Amiga in early 1992, when everyone was still exchanging Amiga games, and around a year later it had noticably shifted towards the PC
(**) They claimed they had to do this to make a profit. Well, that might have been true, but it still wasn't going to sell at that price.
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