Heck yes. This is one fine way to toast the weekend, ain’t it? HP has just announced it’s going to release webOS under an open source license. While the company will cease making hardware for the platform for now, it will continue development on it together with the open source community. Hey Access, you listening? Update: More good news: HP’s CEO just told The Verge that HP will be putting webOS on hardware after all – tablets!
As we all know, HP pulled the plug on webOS pretty quickly, unable to compete with iOS and Android. From that moment onwards, the company has been in a state of flux, with no clear idea of what was going to happen to the relatively innovative mobile operating system. Now, we finally know what’s going to happen: they’re releasing webOS as open source.
“webOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer, “By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices.”
The company presents four key points for the soon-to-be open source project – with a few deserved jabs at Google and Android, right there.
- The goal of the project is to accelerate the open development of the webOS platform
- HP will be an active participant and investor in the project
- Good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation
- Software will be provided as a pure open source project
While all this looks great, the question here is who would actually be using webOS. To me, it sounds like HP couldn’t find a buyer, couldn’t find a partner, and as a last resort, throws it out on the street hoping someone else will take it away.
At the very least, this should help Pre and TouchPad owners, but how much use it’s going to be for people wanting webOS on new hardware remains to be seen.
since when did hp grow balls and brains?
i think i’ll take a look outside, they sky must be falling or something…
Well, despite what peoples first thought might be it could make good business sense _IF_ they get any traction.
Ways to monetize:
– have the biggest/best app store (30% cut)
– protect OEMs from Apple and MS (for a small per device fee)
– make a deal with Amazon/whoever for content(%cut for books, mp3s, movies etc)
– some things I haven’t thought of yet
And sure the OEMs could try to do all these things themselves .. but I doubt they want to. They will gladly buy the package as long as it’s less expensive than what they have to pay for Android and Windows Mobile.
It might work and provide revenue for a long time or they could have gone the Access route, which would have only entailed sunk cost. Which one would you have chosen?
if only I could buy one.
If you can click and type fast enough, you can!
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/07/hp-touchpad-ebay/
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Thanks! It’s unfortunate that they’re used/refurbished with poor warranty but it’s better than nothing.
I wonder what the price will be, the image shows $550, which I can’t afford. I hope it’s a lot closer to the firesale price.
Oh, $99 USD is what I’ve heard.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I’ve been trying for the past hour to buy one. I didn’t realise what a POS ebay’s web services are. I click on buy now and wait a minute before it returns to the same page I was on. I try various buy now links, add to card, etc. Everything is broken. I thought it might be a firefox problem, so I try it under IE…the page renders differently, but it has the same problems while attempting to purchase.
I’m really astonished that this sale it’s crippling ebay’s service. Is ebay usually this bad?
…Extremely frustrated.
My part time job is at a company that sells wholesale office supplies and electronics online, and I can tell you from that perspective eBay is one of the worst ways to sell online that I’ve ever seen. By comparison, buying on there is a breeze. It’s much easier to list and sell on Amazon but we make so much money on eBay right now we can’t make the switch.
Also, some of the oddball stuff we sell (pressure sensor/transducers for example) simply don’t exist according to Amazon, and they have to go on eBay. Likewise for items we receive as damaged/defective and refurbish (one of my duties there); Amazon won’t let us sell such things but on eBay you can sell pretty much anything that’s not regulated by the BATFE.
All that said, I do feel your pain. More than once I’ve been bitten by a bug on the site that has made me lose out on an item. Events like what you stated have happened to me, as well as not getting email or SMS alerts in time to avoid being outbid in the last 30 minutes of an auction. I know they don’t offer any guarantees during the bidding process, but it’s still a joke. Even the “Buy It Now” process has issues from time to time.
And I’m not even going to get into the Paypal issues; that topic alone could fill a book.
This seems on the surface at least to be great news.
I’m slightly dubious about this, given the following statement in HP’s release:
So this tells us that the release is going to be staggered. It makes me wonder when the full release will be done, or indeed if they will release all of the apps that made up webOS on the TouchPad. Will they even release enough to make a proper working tablet system?
Still, as a non-USian who thus wasn’t able to participate in HP’s firesale I’m heartened to think that I may yet be able to get my hands on a webOS tablet. Yay! 🙂
HP’s webOS Developer Blog posting on this subject, which is reasonably content free, can be found here:
http://developer.palm.com/blog/2011/12/open-source/
Edited 2011-12-09 19:55 UTC
Without hardware though whats the point?
Plenty of existing hardware you know; how many users are stuck on outdated Android and could do with a better OS?
So they update to something alien that has none of their apps? Nah, if they go that far they’ll pick Cyanogen…
That’s what I did. Its pretty painless and straightforward.
It also provides some real life examples of the difficulties that an open source webos will face: Hardware drivers. Cyanogen Mod goes the easy route and basically uses binary blobs that were written for the hardware by the original manufacturer for the same OS. And they still have occasional problems in the development of new releases.
How much more difficult would it be to get those “Android Linux” drivers to work in “Webos linux”? I have no idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t a cakewalk.
I suspect some enterprising fellows in Shēnzhèn might offer hardware with WebOS.
I mean, if they can offer a phone that runs iOS, Blackberry OS, Meego, Symbian, Windows Phone ad infinitum…
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/43232/nokia-n9-7-operating-systems-…
About effin time!
WebOS was an excellent software stack shackled to sub-par hardware. Maybe with the source available, it can finally be ported to some better hardware.
All I can say is… it’s about friggin’ time!!! The homebrew community around WebOS has been phenomenal, and unleashing an open source model around the WebOS platform will likely result in some great advances and needed modernization.
WebOS is one mobile OS that needs to be preserved. I’m still clutching onto my original Palm Pre despite the lack of updates and a keyboard failure (using a virtual keyboard thanks to the homebrew community…it’s a pain, but has gotten me through the past month). WebOS 1.x series STILL trumps just about every other CURRENT mobile OS out there in terms of usability and design. The aging software stack (youtube/webkit/map apps, etc.) is the only problem.
All webOS needs is competitive hardware and a few competent mobile industry giants to market them properly. If companies like HTC or Samsung built some hardware offerings around an open-source WebOS, it just might be enough to bring the platform from the bring of extinction. I’ll keep hoping but won’t hold my breath. =/
I agree with you, except…
I don’t know how others feel about this (and I’m guessing I will be modded down for saying this), but I hope HP exerts just enough control over the project so that vendors will have to abide by a certain set of guidelines when selling WebOS with their phones in order to make sure everybody has the same experience out of the box, and to keep it from becoming the clusterf**k of added vendor bloatware that is currently plaguing Android.
In other words, once you get the phone, then feel free to customize the hell out of it with whatever skins and custom roms you want. But out of the box, it should be the same for everyone, in order to maintain consistency and compatibility.
Edited 2011-12-09 20:12 UTC
Your point is well taken, but Google could achieve the same results simply by using their Android trademark as the stick.
i.e. If you want to use the Android name and logos with your product, you must do X, Y and Z etc… Otherwise you would have to identify it with AOSP or your own fork.
Some suggested XYZ conditions:
X)If you apply custom skins they must be easily user removable so they can get back to pure Android if they so desire.
Y)Guarantee to keep device software updated in a timely manner, and for a reasonable length of time. At said end point any locks applied by OEMs or vendors must be removed.
Z)An anti Carrier IQ, Explicit Opt-Ins for any intrusive tracking, clause.
Google already uses their Market and other service Apps to gain some control. They have the tools they need to prevent fragmentation, they just need to consider some kind of practical compromise between the user and OEM/Vendor’s needs.
Even here in this forum, it wouldn’t take very long to create a pretty comprehensive want-list of reasonable conditions to be placed on the use of Google’s Android trademarks.
What would be yours?
Yeah, but the point is that they’re not doing that, at least not as much as they should.
On the other hand, even when somebody like Amazon releases a device that doesn’t contain the Android name, doesn’t have the Android market, contains none of the Google apps, and doesn’t even look like Android, the idiotic press still calls it an Android tablet, just because it has Android underneath. This certainly does not help the situation.
So true, but if Google started enforcing their trademark’s use, people would be infringing on their trademark by referring to Android within the context of Amazon’s fork. Hence, they would more accurately need to cite the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) as Amazon Fire’s core OS.
What will this do to Mozilla’s efforts? Will this dilute efforts between 2 web OS’s or will it create a healthy competition?
One hopes Mozilla takes this as their base; it will give them a kickstart even if it takes a few weeks of redesign.
Or, this will slow down their project, eat more developer time and kill it off 😐
I worry that it will do the latter.
What isn’t used in the Cathedral winds up in a box at the Bazaar.
And if one finds something really usefull at the Bazaar, one might polish it up nicely and bring it to the Cathedral.
I’m just saying.
ref the Access call there – the BeOS source would need stripping of a lot of licenced code in there, there’s stuff licenced in from Metrowerks, Intel, HeadSpace and others I can no longer remember. Even a lot of the drivers were written under contract.
I’d imagine HP know the licencing status of everything in WebOS pretty well – I doubt Access know the status of quite old code they bought third hand so easily.
There’s quite a lot of GPL abuse IIRC. Loads and loads of licensed stuff. The code can be quite messy in places too. Haiku is probably a better horse to bet on these days.
To me, Access is an awkwardly-managed Japanese company that has a rather very difficult time embracing the concept of software managements.
webOS is genuinely awesome and is exactly the kind of design that has a bright future (HTML5 apps tying into a rich platform for added features, see also: the whole point of Windows 8). This is great news, and certainly has more OSS potential than Android for example, which belongs to a much older style of monolithic design and is ruled completely by Google.
A few people I know were lucky enough to get an HP touchpad and they seem to love it. It would be nice to have a choice for a tablet.
They are doing something similar WebOS. Will they use ENYO? Will they be irrelevant?
Since it is open source, there is a good possibility that we’ll start seeing ports to Android devices (Galaxy S2, Captivate Glide, Razr, Droid 4 etc). That interview with HP’s CEO looks very promising too.
A lot of these vendors don’t want to see a world where mobile is dominated by Google, so having WebOS as a second option would suit most of them.
Also with it being Linux based, if you develop all the drivers to allow Android to run on your device then also making it run WebOS should be relatively easy. It would be good to see phones offered with either platform available, and the option to switch firmware.
I’d like to see dual boot!
I would love to see HTC or Samsung phone with webOS, been waiting one since I got my Pre.
Once it becomes open source, I’m sure someone with write a framework to run Android apps on it. Then it would be a great OS with lots of apps too.
Just like Samsung and HTC have found they’ll be targets for the Apple patent trolls. While I support patents, how about doing some prior art research first Apple?
I couldn’t be happier for WebOS, a more seamless mobile Linux than Android. Very smooth, tasteful, pretty and functional.
Are there places for improvement – yes.
Is it perfect – no, but after using it for a day (and Android for over a year) I can see its a great platform to start from.
HOORAY. Meg is my new hero.
I think that Amazon could be a potential partner for WebOS. Amazon already has their own software store. Why not just add support for WebOS?
I imagine that WebOS will be a great way to run HTML5 Apps as well. I think the future could still be bright for WebOS, if HP creates an open development model around WebOS with final decisions being made in a Linus sort of way. Perhaps this can be combined with the Meego/Tizen efforts as well.
Ya, I imagine fusing android apps with WebOS could be interesting as well, but it seems unlikely to happen due to the android/linux kernel fork.
At any rate, I hope projects like cyanogenmod can benefit from this, and as cyanogen has pointed out, a lot may depend on what license they release this under.
Releasing webOS as open source is all well and good, but unless someone (HP or another OEM) actually releases new kit running webOS, then the OS is doomed. The firesale TouchPad/Pre owners will eventually replace their hardware and only a tiny percentage of users would be willing to install webOS on existing non-webOS hardware, even if it was packaged as a 100% idiot-proof install.
Witness Linux – clearly the most technically advanced, customisable OS that can run on virtually everything that’s got a CPU. Where it gets shipped pre-loaded, it dominates the market (Android phones, home routers anyone?). When it doesn’t (pretty well all desktops, laptops and netbooks), virtually no-one installs it, despite the Linux installer being much easier to use (and allows you to dual boot, unlike the Windows installer).
So until we see tablets, laptops, phones (and, yes, even printers) coming out with webOS pre-installed with a competitive price/spec, it’s still a zombie OS as far as I’m concerned. Oh, and Whitman’s statement that it’ll be used in future HP tablets has me worried!
Unless HP are planning to slash their prices (bringing out a tablet that’s slightly *worse* than an iPad2 at the same price as an iPad2 was one of the main reasons for the firesale!), then I’m not very optimistic at all. The only way you’ll sway someone from buying an iPad2 is to release better hardware (and a half-decent OS helps too!) at a cheaper price – something that all non-Apple tablet OEMs are struggling to do.
Edited 2011-12-10 09:53 UTC
I think Thom interprets this correctly. Given their current position, there’s little else HP could do with WebOS, other than attempt to sell it. Man, to think that only a little over a year ago, HP bought the thing for $1.8 billion and now they’re reduced to this. Well, maybe it’ll work for them …
This is great! Here are my two top thoughts:
1) The part of the source that will potentially find the most widespread use outside HP is the Enyo framework. It’s a really well-designed, easy-to-use, component-based UI framework/toolkit with declarative syntax that’s written all in JavaScript and outputs HTML/CSS (similar to Sencha Touch). I imagine it could really find a niche throughout the developer community for developing touch-optimized HTML5 apps, on all kinds of platforms.
2) Maybe (probably) Intel/Samsung will pick up some code and integrate it into Tizen. Seems like a good idea because Tizen was kind of doomed otherwise IMHO.
Edited 2011-12-10 11:09 UTC
I own an HP Touchpad and love it. WebOs is super. Glad to hear it’s being open sourced.
I had to think twice when I read this, wondering if it was one of OSNew’s clever april fools pranks.
This is the best news I’ve heard in a while. Crossing my fingers that in the not-to-distant future I’ll be able to put webOS on my BB Playbook.
I also hope that webOS is looked at as a liable alternative to the current desktop environments on Linux.
That’s spot on. How much time before x86 port? Intel, how come you didn’t see this coming?
Would like it if this means finally getting an update for my Pixi Plus.
I’ve had a Pre, Pixi, Pre2 and Pre3 over the years in the hope that with each new version of webOS Palm/HP would fix the WPA2 Enterprise wifi bug but they never did. Hopefully OS developers will be able to. In a nutshell the phone continues to use the cellular modem instead of wifi when connected to a Cisco 802.1X network (like in the hospital I work in which gets no cellular signal as it is essentially a big Faraday cage). Turning off cellular data in the dialler app forces the phone to use the wifi but it is a big PITA to remember to turn it on and off manually.
I’d also like to see a generic VoIP/SIP plugin architecture instead of the current hardwired Skype (which doesn’t work very well either).
Other than these issues which have been the real showstoppers for me using a Pre at work I have always loved webOS and am really glad to see it having a future.
I hope there’s a merger between bada and webOS to make an ultimate open source mobile OS. I can dream, can’t I?
Open and free WebOS will be more than a competition for Gnome and Unity on tablets. At this moment WebOS practically burns them to the ground. G3&U have some similarities, such as intense use of javascript, but I don’t see how they could compete.
I still have hope to install Gnome 3 on a tablet some day, but free WebOS is a tempting choice.
HP is going retain all 600 WebOS employees to keep on evolving the platform. Glad
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203413304577088582229…
Wonder why they don’t get 2 or 3 of those employees to get dalvik working in WebOS. All they really need is the Amazon appstore.
+1
Maybe it’s in the works
But who exactly owns the BeOS copyrights and IP? HP or ACCESS?
It’s almost certainly Access. IIRC, Palm bought the Be IP, which PalmSource retained when they were spun off, then PalmSource later became Access.