HP CEO Says Google-Motorola Deal Could Close-Source Android

swandives writes "WebOS could be an important player in the long run as an open-source mobile OS, because Android could become closed source with Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman said during a speech at the HP Global Partner conference in Las Vegas. It may take up to four years for the complete impact of webOS to be felt, Whitman said. HP has said it would release WebOS — originally developed by Palm for phones and tablets — to the open-source community. The company bought Palm in 2010 but late last year announced it will not make devices that use the software."

Re:Close-Source Android

[Anonymous Coward]

Not at all. Android 3.0 is closed source. 4.0 is open source again, but nobody knows exactly what was part of the 3.0 that Google's customers, er select-OEMs, got for their tablets.

Re:Close-Source Android

[dave420]

Android 3.0 is not closed source. You can go check out a copy if you want. They held off releasing their changes back to the public because it simply wasn't up to scratch, due to the rushed nature of moving to 3.x. Everyone knows exactly what part of 3.x that was given to the manufacturers, as you can get your own copy yourself.

Re:Close-Source Android

[paintballer1087]

This is incorrect. Google released the source code of 3.0, however they did not create tags for the Honeycomb releases. All of the code is in the history. This was done to try and get a handle on fragmentation, and to keep people from putting a tablet only OS on a phone. ICS is basically a more polished Honeycomb, with the phone portions of the OS included.

Citation: http://www.techspot.com/news/46260-source-code-for-android-30-and-40-released.html/ [techspot.com]

Re:Close-Source Android

[Kjella]

Linux is the only piece that's GPL licensed, the rest is Apache licensed - not to mention fully written by Google so they're copyright holders and can relicense at will. So if Google wanted to they could have a tivoized phone with not a whiff of source for anything but the kernel out by the end of the day. Nothing stopping them but of course they can't take back what they've already licensed so others would just fork from the last Apache release.

Re:What is he smoking?

[d3ac0n]

The CEO of HP is Meg Whitman. A Woman.

Also, the old CEO, Leo Apotheker, did screw up and cause WebOS to flop. That's part of why he was fired. That and his crazy statements about getting out of the PC market borked up HP stock prices and caused the stock holders to lose BILLIONS in value in a single day. (That'll get anyone fired.)