Replied to: HP is making webOS open-source

December 9 2011, 6:05pm

Amazing news, probably the best thing that could have happened to the OS. One benefit that came out of this whole HP debacle is that thanks to the fire sale a lot of people now own a webOS device, and experienced the great features it has to offer. Hoping it breaths new life into it's, at one time, rapidly growing community of enthusiasts and hackers.

It will be interesting to see if any major hardware manufacturer picks up the OS from the get-go. Even if no one does, it will definitely be popular in the modder community (buy an android phone, flash it with webOS). And it sounds like HP will be getting back into the tablet business in 2013 as well: http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/09/hps-whitman-well-make-webos-powered-tablets-in-2013.

I just hope they can open source it quickly, open sourcing a what was before close-sourced OS is not a quick process. This move to open-source can be a big benefit to HP if they can pull it off well; you get a lot of positive perception of a company's brand when you open-source something because you giving away something of value for free (you don't see many google haters out there do you?).

One of my friends asked me "With android adding so many iconic webos-like features such as app cards and swipe-to-close, why not just back android?". I enjoy these new ICS features (android fan here), but I've played around with ice cream sandwich and it doesn't feel much like webOS; for example I can't use swipe-to-close from the app - i need to go to the app drawer, and it's not really "closing" the app. As well, building apps for webOS is very different, one of the benefits of which is they're built on very common web-technologies such JS and CSS, so they can be very lightweight and fast. There is room for both of these very different open-source phone/tablet OS's.