Gruber's take was spot-on: "I think this is just the difference between putting your dog down and letting it free on a distant mountain road."
I'm puzzled why their press release references "the open source community" as if that's a coherent entity. I highly doubt there's anyone out there to take on the amount of work required to get this moving again.
Lincoln, the "underground" developer community for WebOS is quite large, and have had a great influence on the development of the OS up until now. They will be ecstatic about this. I would say that the necessary community to make this project work is already in place, and the gate has just been opened.
Lincoln, the "underground" developer community for WebOS is quite large, and have had a great influence on the development of the OS up until now.
There is a massive, gaping chasm between app development and OS development. All the iOS (by far the most popular platform for devs) devs in the world combined would not band together to build iOS6 if Apple ditched it and open sourced, and iOS has the advantage of A) Not being last into the race and B) not having been on hiatus the last year or more.
I was referring to OS development as well. The homebrew community has had much more influence over the development of the OS than you think. Things like COMPCACHE and advanced clock management were adopted because they were developed by homebrewers.
Didn't see that happening. I was expecting them to keep it a little longer first and attempt to make it a lightweight OS for devices. I have to agree with Matt, I don't think this will move much now.
It's the best move HP could have made. It's good PR, they had a dead asset, one that was never going to yield a return for them. They could kill it altogether and gotten nothing from it, they maybe, possibly could have sold it for pennies on the dollar, but then run the risk that someone else could succeed where they failed and make them appear even less competent (if that's possible), but if you make it open source, and it flops, at least there is that nice PR that goes with it, if it succeeds, you can at least take a little credit down the road and possibly find a way to leverage it to make a little money off of it later.
Hmmm... I was considering trying to get the Touchpad on Sunday... This will probably push me over the edge... As djmeph said the WebOS homebrew community is pretty large so this could be a great thing for WebOS...
And it's worth noting that they've said they're going to work on new hardware for webOS as well. It's not like they're just putting it out to pasture. They're just allowing a larger pool of devs to contribute towards something they'll use commercially for free.
I think the Android community is going to go fucking ballistic with ports. WebOS is a *NIX OS just like Android, which means shared libs and drivers.
Yes, someone had already developed an Android emulator that worked with apps from an early version of Android, but it had disappeared at some point. I would like to see more of this kind of thing popping up.
Had there been some 16gb models left for $99 I might of snagged one just to play with, but I wasn't going to pay $150 since that is approaching Kindle Fire/Nook Color territory.
There's more to a device than just its hardware specs, or even a list of functionality. User experience is a big part of it too. Not knocking the Touchpad and the slick WebOS, but rather pointing out that some may just prefer the more streamlined Fire/Nooks.
There's more to a device than just its hardware specs, or even a list of functionality. User experience is a big part of it too. Not knocking the Touchpad and the slick WebOS, but rather pointing out that some may just prefer the more streamlined Fire/Nooks.
Especially when some of us aren't really big fans of the 9-10 inch tablets.
There's more to a device than just its hardware specs, or even a list of functionality. User experience is a big part of it too. Not knocking the Touchpad and the slick WebOS, but rather pointing out that some may just prefer the more streamlined Fire/Nooks.
Oh, I definitely agree with this. As far as a small form factor and an eReader goes the Nook/Kindle can't be beat. Some people prefer the smaller tablets and/or eReaders, but as far as 10 inch tablets, it's hard to beat the pricepoint of $150 for a dual core tablet with 32GB of storage. Granted WebOS doesn't have nearly the amount of apps that Android has, but I'll only be using it for Couch Surfing the internet and playing the occasional game of Angry Birds, so for that it is a fantastic price.
Yep, I'll probably install the Dual Boot option so I can enjoy WebOS but still have Android to play Netflix and a few other apps that don't run on WebOS.
The problem for all such ports is always the bootloader. There is no standard solution for bootloaders in the Android world, so each device has its own unique way of bootstrapping the OS.
I am typing this on my new HP Touchpad. I'm loving it so far, I cannot wait to see what the WebOS Community can come up with now that it is open source.
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
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I'm puzzled why their press release references "the open source community" as if that's a coherent entity. I highly doubt there's anyone out there to take on the amount of work required to get this moving again.
/me hides
It's the only move that made sense.
Especially when some of us aren't really big fans of the 9-10 inch tablets.
Oh, I definitely agree with this. As far as a small form factor and an eReader goes the Nook/Kindle can't be beat. Some people prefer the smaller tablets and/or eReaders, but as far as 10 inch tablets, it's hard to beat the pricepoint of $150 for a dual core tablet with 32GB of storage. Granted WebOS doesn't have nearly the amount of apps that Android has, but I'll only be using it for Couch Surfing the internet and playing the occasional game of Angry Birds, so for that it is a fantastic price.
This excites me.