HP Turns WebOS Open Source, Could Offer Manufacturers Alternative to Android

[markpollock]

HP saw that webOS was great and wanted to major player in the mobile world. 😀 🙂

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[maflynn]

Apotheker will forever be the scapegoat but let's get real, the HP board hired an enterprise software guy as CEO because they wanted to be an enterprise software company. As it happened, the board **** their pants and fired the scapegoat.

Definitely, they hired him when they knew he had zero hardware experience - just running a software services company. Secondly many of the board members did not even personally meet him during the interview process - ludicrous consider the position he was being considered for

 

[*LTD*]

It was on the market for less than 2 months, and there wasn't a single bit of advertising for the thing. It wasn't that HP couldn't sell it, rather it was almost like they didn't even want to.

No, it was that HP couldn't sell it because it sucked. Performance was lousy, there was a serious case of app-lack, and reviewers had panned the device from nearly all angles (not by accident.)

HP churned out a piece of unoptimized crap. This is how you ruin what is otherwise a good OS.

 

[dethmaShine]

Apple is holding back updates just as bad as android, IMO. (iphone4 siri 😉)

Its funny that you cannot even differentiate b/w the two categories of updates. :slowclap:

 

[maflynn]

HP churned out a piece of unoptimized crap. This is how you ruin what is otherwise a good OS.

Sad but true, but you cannot just lay blame to HP. Palm in releasing the Pre produced a cheap under-powered phone that was too plasticy.

So while the hardware was awful, the OS was ground-breaking and this news of being open-sourced is great news.

 

[*LTD*]

Sad but true, but you cannot just lay blame to HP. Palm in releasing the Pre produced a cheap under-powered phone that was too plasticy.

So while the hardware was awful, the OS was ground-breaking and this news of being open-sourced is great news.

It's pretty amazing how incompetent leadership, red-tape, and suit-driven bureaucracy can kill a great OS in the market. Trying to get consumers to notice WebOS *again* after Palm fumbled it was difficult enough, only to have HP destroy whatever positive mindshare it had left.

Dragging it out into the market once again under some other licensing scheme? Please. This is like a Mike Tyson's 15th comeback extravaganza. How many more times do unimaginative, undifferentiated OEMs want to pull WebOS out of the grave? It had two big chances to make a huge splash in the market. In its current form, WebOS as WebOS is finished.

 

[maflynn]

It's pretty amazing how incompetent leadership, red-tape, and suit-driven bureaucracy can kill a great OS in the market

What is more surprising is that it was an apple executive who left apple and went to palm who failed on the design of the phone itself. The OS was great but it was an incomplete package because of the hardware. HP just mismanaged what could have been a great opportunity.

In its current form, WebOS as WebOS is finished.

I think its too early to make that pronouncement. If a couple of hardware vendors gets behind webOS, it could start generate some critical mass.

 

[KnightWRX]

phone that was too plasticy.

What's with all the plastic hate around here ? Hello, it's called the iPhone 3GS and it's sold wonderfully. Polycarbonite MacBooks (a fancy word for plastic) and all the other plastic products Apple have put out and still do... 😕

This plastic hate is so irrational.

 

[dethmaShine]

What's with all the plastic hate around here ? Hello, it's called the iPhone 3GS and it's sold wonderfully. Polycarbonite MacBooks (a fancy word for plastic) and all the other plastic products Apple have put out and still do... 😕

This plastic hate is so irrational.

It is not irrational; but I would agree that people forget that not all plastic products are the same.

I've used a number of so called 'plastic' phones that feel great. But some that don't include SGS2, etc. iPhone 3G was all right; so was Mozart 7.

 

[divinox]

What's with all the plastic hate around here ? Hello, it's called the iPhone 3GS and it's sold wonderfully. Polycarbonite MacBooks (a fancy word for plastic) and all the other plastic products Apple have put out and still do... 😕

This plastic hate is so irrational.

I blame Aqua!

 

[gnasher729]

and yet Android is gaining market share from iOS.

Actually, no. Most of Android's gain in market share comes from owners of cheap (or not quite so cheap if they look nice) dumb phones to inexpensive smart phones. There is a high end market, and that is where Apple is playing, and Android doesn't take any of Apple's share away in that area.

 

[Sackvillenb]

Open source... although I doubt this Os will get very far, making it open source will certainly help. I hope it does get far actually, the more diversity and competition in mobile operating systems the better.

 

[Michael Scrip]

What's with all the plastic hate around here ? Hello, it's called the iPhone 3GS and it's sold wonderfully. Polycarbonite MacBooks (a fancy word for plastic) and all the other plastic products Apple have put out and still do... 😕

This plastic hate is so irrational.

It wasn't just that the Palm Pre was made out of plastic... it had general build quality issues too.

The slider wasn't very good... the keyboard wasn't so hot either... the MicroUSB door can snap off... the power button can fail. And there were even some reports where the screen twisted around. It's not supposed to do that!

While the iPhone 3GS is made of plastic... it's also a solid unit with no moving parts. Big difference.

 

[KnightWRX]

While the iPhone 3GS is made of plastic... it's also a solid unit with no moving parts. Big difference.

My iPhone 3GS suffered a mute switch break down, a "common issue with this model" like the Apple genius put it before replacing it.

All electronics have "build quality" issues it seems, Apple's and the competition. But that wasn't the comment made, the comment made was it was "plasticy".

Again, I don't get the hate against plastic, a comment offered uttered around these parts. It would seem some people think nothing made of plastic can be well made...

 

[Michael Scrip]

But that wasn't the comment made, the comment made was it was "plasticy".

Again, I don't get the hate against plastic, a comment offered uttered around these parts. It would seem some people think nothing made of plastic can be well made...

Maybe "plasticy" isn't the correct word... but whatever. That's what he said.

You're right... there are lots of things made of plastic that are well made... the Palm Pre apparently was not.

I've handled a few Palm Pres in my life... and they were wiggly and not very solid is the hand. That's my opinion.

As for the "plastic hate" around these parts... I don't know what to tell you. You might just have to ignore it.

 

[rdowns]

I think Jean-Louis Gassée got it right.

Tweet
We strongly believe that the best days for webOS are still ahead.

Thus spake Meg Whitman in her memo to the troops, an intramural rendition of HP’s official announcement that webOS will be “contributed” to the Open Source community.

…the executive team has been working to determine the best path forward for this highly respected software. We looked at all the options in the market today…By providing webOS to the open source community…we have the potential to fundamentally change the landscape.

Either she thinks we’re dimwits, or she’s being cleverly cheeky. Does she think we’ll fall for the tired corpospeak? “Victory! WhatWereWeThinking v3.0 has been released to the Open Source community”. Or is she slyly fessing up? “After much abuse inside the HP cage, it’s clear that webOS can only be restored to health if released into the wild.”

Releasing a product as Open Source isn’t always an admission of failure; see exhibits Linux or, more recently, WebKit. But the successful Open Source offerings were created in Open Source form. They weren’t “contributed” in a last-ditch effort to save face after unsuccessful attempts to monetize a proprietary version.

Furthermore, there’s real money to be made with an Open Source product…if you know what you’re doing. Look at Red Hat: nicely profitable, with nearly a $10B market cap. They make a lot of money selling Linux…or, more accurately, by selling a Linux “distro”, a suite of products and services that surround the free Linux kernel. They make money the iTunes way: Customers won’t pay for tunes that are otherwise (more or less legally) freely available, but they will pay for services around the music.

So is Open Source the way to go for webOS? I don’t think so.

Let’s look at Symbian, a product that’s similar to webOS in its complicated history: Born at Psion; moved to a Nokia-Motorola-Ericsson-Matsushita-Psion joint venture; thrown into Open Source by the Symbian Foundation, an even more complicated JV. Lately, things have become even murkier as Symbian appears to have been “outsourced to Accenture”.

Adobe’s Flex is another kicked-to-the-kerb example. When HTML5 appeared to displace Flash, Adobe officially open-sourced Flex to the non-profit Apache Software Foundation.

Even the success of Firefox, certainly the most visible Open Source application, might not be as indisputable as we first thought. With net assets of $120M at the end of 2009, the “non-profit” Mozilla Foundation, Firefox’s progenitor, has been the great Open Source success story. 2009 revenues were $104 million, most of which was generated by sending searches to Google from the Firefox browser. In other words, Google has been Firefox’ sugar daddy as the Mountain View company battles Microsoft’s Internet Explorer quasi-monopoly.

But things have changed. Google Chrome is in its ascendancy; Google points to security holes in Firefox. Firefox served at Google’s pleasure, but is no longer needed.

Not exactly a bona fides Open Source success.

(Ironically — or at least amusingly — Meg Whitman singled out Firefox as an example of Open Source success in a post-announcement interview. To add tech credentials to appearance, she had HP director, venture investor, and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen sitting by her side. We won’t dwell on the admission that trotting out Andreessen represents.)

A closer look at HP’s official statements makes things even less clear:

HP will engage the open source community to help define the charter of the open source project under a set of operating principles:
. 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
HP also will contribute ENYO, the application framework for webOS, to the community in the near future along with a plan for the remaining components of the user space.
Beginning today, developers and customers are invited to provide input and suggestions at http://developer.palm.com/blog/.

This is language designed to obfuscate rather than clarify, filled with qualifiers and weasel words. Read it again and ask yourself: Is there even one actionable sentence? are we given numbers, dates, some measurable commitment?

No. Instead, we get lame HR-like phrases:

. HP will engage the open source community — in what kind of embrace?
. active participant and investor — by how much and when?
. transparent and inclusive governance — why not opaque and exclusionary?
. a pure open source project — as opposed to yesterday’s impure and proprietary?
. near future… along with a plan — we don’t know, we’re just saying

Nowhere does Whitman state how much money, how many people, or when things might coalesce.

Allow me to translate:

We tried and tried and found no takers for webOS. Android is too strong, our old partner Microsoft leaned on us, and webOS is seen as damaged goods. We used the Open Source exit to get kudos from vocal enthusiasts. We know it’s cynical, but what do you want us to say? Good bye and good luck?

The charade (and cynicism) doesn’t stop there. Now we’re told HP might make webOS-powered tablets. Not in 2012, that year’s roadmap has been inked, HP is committed to Windows 8 tablets. Maybe in 2013. That, ladies and gentlemen, attests to HP’s unwavering commitment to webOS.

By 2013 there will be tablets coming from all the usual suspects (except RIM): Samsung, Googorola and other Android players, Amazon, Microsoft’s OEMs and newly acquired subsidiary Nokia…and, of course, Apple’s iPad HD2.

When I hear Whitman make such statements, I’m reminded of the old joke about the difference between a computer salesperson and a used-car salesman: The used-car gent knows he’s lying. For my alma mater’s sake, for HP’s good, let’s hope Meg Whitman knows she’s putting us on.

 

[JAT]

No, it was that HP couldn't sell it because it sucked. Performance was lousy, there was a serious case of app-lack, and reviewers had panned the device from nearly all angles (not by accident.)

HP churned out a piece of unoptimized crap. This is how you ruin what is otherwise a good OS.

I often agree with your take on tablets, but not this one. See:

Update: In an interview with The Verge, HP CEO Meg Whitman reveals that the company is planning to use webOS on future tablet products, indicating the company is not abandoning mobile hardware entirely. No timeframe for such products has been announced.

HP has been wishy-washy, that is the problem. The faults of the tablet are mainly that they couldn't keep the same plan for 10 minutes. What was it on the market, 6 weeks originally? They didn't have time to add a single feature. By your standard, the original iPhone sucked, too.

And then they end the tablet/PC division, then they say "oh, we didn't mean the PC part", and now she says they'll make tablets again. If I was on the board, I'd be asking wtf they are doing at all.

What's with all the plastic hate around here ? Hello, it's called the iPhone 3GS and it's sold wonderfully. Polycarbonite MacBooks (a fancy word for plastic) and all the other plastic products Apple have put out and still do... 😕

This plastic hate is so irrational.

I found the worst part of that post to be the misspelling of the word. It should be "plasticky". 😉

 

[MattInOz]

Apotheker will forever be the scapegoat but let's get real, the HP board hired an enterprise software guy as CEO because they wanted to be an enterprise software company. As it happened, the board **** their pants and fired the scapegoat.

HE can't have been that good if he didn't see that the WebOS ENYO platform would have made a brilliant Enterprise software platform.

If rumours are true that ENYO apps run well on the iPad or any webkit/html5 browser then he should have been the one to realize that HP should have tied it servers not client devices. I mean as a corporate platform for Communication both within the company and with clients it would have been massive. Build once, Maintain centrally and run anywhere on almost any device.

 

[rdowns]

HE can't have been that good if he didn't see that the WebOS ENYO platform would have made a brilliant Enterprise software platform.

If rumours are true that ENYO apps run well on the iPad or any webkit/html5 browser then he should have been the one to realize that HP should have tied it servers not client devices. I mean as a corporate platform for Communication both within the company and with clients it would have been massive. Build once, Maintain centrally and run anywhere on almost any device.

Where did I say he was good? He clearly didn't execute on his (and the board's) plans nor communicate it effectively. I said he was a scapegoat, not that he was good.

 

[LeoNobilis]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

One update to he iPad and it could rule webos. I keep hearing all this noise about webos as if it's god. Please I heard the latest Ben Stiller/ Eddie Murphy movie Tower Heist was awesome and it wasn't. It was another flop. If webos was such an effing game changer it would have taken off like a rocket.
My prediction is that by next fall we'll see iPad gestures. If that happens webos and its so called swipe to throw away feature won't be a damn footnote.

From the standpoint of quality, a product's commercial success is of little merit. And vice versa. If Lamborghini goes bankrupt - would it imply to you that their cars are rubbish, compared to the very successful Hyundai? Well, not to me!

Another example: Gerard Corbiau's "Farinelli" has made a fraction of the profit the "Hangover" has made. Does it mean, "Hangover" comes close to comparing to "Farinelli"? To an american, I'm sure. Not to an aesthetically-inclined soul. Or, "Barry Lyndon"'s public reception was quite a bit of a disappointment. Does it mean it's objectively inferior to "Gone with the wind"? To a redneck it is, I'm sure. But not to a civilised man.

Likewise, David Daniels, Andeas Scholl, Philippe Jaroussky & Brian Asawa collectively earn (alas!) considerably less than some successful hiphop pleb alone. What does that say of their merit as singers? Nothing. Does that even mean the latter can sing at all? Well, absolutely not! All it says is that the crowd, supporting the hiphop pleb, lamentably, has not a modicum of taste (a gross understatement) or the slightest conception of Beauty. Or a grasp of Art (provided one does;t want to embarass himself by calling hiphop "Art").

There you go, mate! Under the rule of democracy - where everyone's opinion is commonly regarded as worthwhile (which is stupid, if you ask me) - commercial success of a product does not necessarily - often does not at all - reflect its quality.

 

[Renzatic]

Another example: Gerard Corbiau's "Farinelli" has made a fraction of the profit the "Hangover" has made. Does it mean, "Hangover" comes close to comparing to "Farinelli"? To an american, I'm sure. Not to an aesthetically-inclined soul.

Good points, but please. Lets not paint an entire nation of people with one very large brush. It's obnoxious.

 

[hchung]

Yes, the docs agree with me.

You're confusing onPause with onStop, onPause is called when something is over the app window but not covering it totally (like a dialog box), the app is not frozen.

onStop is called when the app is not on the foreground and is totally paused.

That you think I'm wrong is turning into a perfect example of how awfully written the Android docs are.

onStop, onPause... it doesn't matter. NEITHER halt app execution.

Don't believe me? Attached is source code for a test. I wrote it and ran it on Android 2.3 emulator just now because I gave you the benefit of the doubt and wanted to make sure I wasn't reading the docs wrong.

It launches a thread in onCreate which sends a message to the log every 2 seconds. onStop and onPause both send a log saying that the events occurred. When you launch it, you'll see the messages in LogCat. When you hit the home button to background the app, onStop gets called and even then the thread's log messages still keep coming out afterwards. Therefore the app is still running.

 

[mattdrat]

I got my TouchPad for £89 - bargain of the century. However I didn't really use it until Cyanogen Mod was ported to the touchpad - even in alpha, it was far superior to WebOS.

The only way the WebOS platform will survive is if HP have a good developer programme - with tools and guides available to encourage developers to build apps. Without apps, there is really no content, and with no content the platform will be dead - open source or not.

 

[haruhiko]

I have a question. By open sourcing WebOS, does it mean that now Android (or iOS) can legally "copy" the whole "card multitasking" system of WebOS without paying any license fee to HP? Or they have to use the whole thing completely without breaking it apart?

 

[Oletros]

That you think I'm wrong is turning into a perfect example of how awfully written the Android docs are.

onStop, onPause... it doesn't matter. NEITHER halt app execution.

Don't believe me? Attached is source code for a test. I wrote it and ran it on Android 2.3 emulator just now because I gave you the benefit of the doubt and wanted to make sure I wasn't reading the docs wrong.

It launches a thread in onCreate which sends a message to the log every 2 seconds. onStop and onPause both send a log saying that the events occurred. When you launch it, you'll see the messages in LogCat. When you hit the home button to background the app, onStop gets called and even then the thread's log messages still keep coming out afterwards. Therefore the app is still running.

I will look at it when I arrive home this afternoon