HP Making webOS Open Source 169
Several readers sent word of HP's announcement that the company will be contributing webOS to the open source community. According to HP's press release, they will continue to be active in webOS's development, and one of their goals will be to avoid fragmentation. ENYO, the application framework for webOS, will also go open source in the near future.
Best choice (Score:5, Insightful)
From an economics perspective, this is probably the best return on investment they will get: goodwill.
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Re:Best choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Comparing WebOS to Symbian is rather inaccurate.
WebOS is based on Linux and so, most of the skill sets for developing for any linux platform, will transfer relatively easily. And porting the entire platform will most likely be much less of a problem than Symbian. The biggest issue I ever saw with WebOS was simply that it was closed and restricted to HP.
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First of all, if they released it with good documentation, they're not simply dumping dead matter, it's a generous gift.
WebOS is based on GNU and so, most of the skill sets for developing Web or for any *NIX platform, will transfer relatively easily. And porting the entire platform will most likely be
...[moderately, non-uniformly] toilsome, because of drivers.
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it's a generous gift.
I'd wait until you hear the terms before you say that. If their plan is to GPL it and then dual-license it and force anyone who wants to build an actual product with it to buy a commercial license, "gift" might be a bit of an exaggeration.
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You realize what you said is impossible, right? If they GPL it, that grants you enough freedom to build an actual product; so they don't have any leverage to "force" you to buy the commercial license.
Tell it to MySQL.
In practice, companies that produce commercial products tend not to want to release the source code to the proprietary portions of their products, therefore they choose the commercial license. It's not exactly "forcing" commercial customers to pay, but if the code was really a "gift" then it would be released under a BSD-style license or something similarly permissive.
Re:Best choice (Score:5, Interesting)
The community at large had little reason to care about Symbian. webOS has many things that are quite attractive about it for people that are not already committed to Symbian.
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> any employees thinking that this will lengthen their career should think again
As a current webOS employee that fully expected to be laid off today, this announcement has *already* lengthened my career at HP.
Re:Best choice (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Symbian is that the Symbian releases were totally useless for actually compiling and installing onto any platform. And there was absolutely NO documentation on what any of the stuff was or where to find the potentially-interesting bits. Nor was there any documentation or info to point people in the right direction if they wanted to write hardware interface code and drivers and try to get the code running on a given piece of hardware.
With WebOS, assuming they open source all of it and dont keep important parts like the user-space binary daemon and libraries used to talk to the cellular modem closed source, all the stuff needed to actually get a self-bult OS running on a real world device like the TouchPad or the Pre should in theory be there. And again, if its all opened, porting it to new platforms should be a matter of whether you can find the needed hardware information for the platform you want to port to.
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Nice work. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they could have an opening here. If they really make efforts to avoid fragmentation and get get WebOS onto some future phone handsets, they could avoid some of the mistakes that have been made with Android.
Let people install WebOS however they want, don't load it up with crapware, give the users full control over the system. Make this the truly "open" mobile OS. ("open" means more than being able to see the source)
Re:Nice work. (Score:5, Interesting)
But how? If they use a license that forbids locking the phones and/or removing features and/or adding bloatware, who would make the phones? What carriers would sell them? Not saying your wrong at all. In fact I very much hope they drive carriers more towards being dumb pipes -- but the devil is in the details on something like this. What would the license need to be? GPLv3?
Meego is already there. (Score:4, Informative)
Rooting an N9
Settings -> security -> developer mode
Re:Meego is already there. (Score:5, Informative)
And WebOS was/is also "rooted" on all devices. You just clicked on developer mode. Done.
It had been that day from day one.
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You are probably correct. But it was in there a looong time, and pretty quickly from release.
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That's not real root. Try using insmod to see what I mean.
Now on N900, there things work like they should.
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Indeed enabling developer mode gets you a non-root terminal or SSH login. You can get real root on N9 through "devel-su" though, so while it's one more step it's still easy enough.
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No, that doesn't do it either.
Like I said, try to insmod something (not already loaded) after devel-su.
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(Just tried it.) You're right, insmod complains of insufficient permissions. It is uid 0 though, but apparently Aegis is blocking certain actions at the kernel level...
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There has been a lot of talk about this in the community. I've not had a chance to experiment much yet, but as far as I gather, if you want Aegis gone, you'll have to flash a new kernel.
The N9 will allow it to boot, but part of Aegis includes encrypted datastores, with the encryption being performed by a security chip. If an unsigned kernel is loaded, the bootloader will tell the security chip and the encryption keys either change or are invalidated, which makes the data stores unreadable. Apparently that b
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If they really make efforts to avoid fragmentation and get get WebOS onto some future phone handsets, they could avoid some of the mistakes that have been made with Android.
Well one of the things that drive Android fragmentation is manufacturer add-ons and locked-down devices, meaning that you're not running the generic stock install and you probably can't install the vanilla version on your phone even if you want to. My understanding is that's not so much Google's fault as it is the carriers' fault and the device manufacturers' fault.
So can HP handle that better? I'm not sure how. What leverage do they have over the carriers?
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Yeah, but here's the problem: When HP says, "You must allow the reference build to be installed," what's to stop the manufacturer/carrier from responding, "Ok, then we won't use your OS"? What is their leverage to keep this actually open when Google can't even keep Android open.
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Otherwise, with only a short list of devices it'll run on there won't be much of a commu
Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
This is clearly the direction things are heading, and like or hate Javascript, it's going to become the lingua franca for everything but system level or the most computationally intensive stuff. People get tired of reimplementing things they've already done in different languages. There are a lot of things converging right now, and this just might be something that pushes things over the top.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
The worst thing about WebOS is that it is built on things that suck that people are standardizing on elsewhere anyway. Javascript
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Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Or just write it in C++ with Qt. Get far better speed, vast portability, and no need to use a shitty language like Javascript.
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So I'm having trouble seeing how it is so vastly portable to some of the platforms that are most relevant.
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What I would like is the seperation of code and UI so I can work on the underlying code and then somebody else can work on the UI code
You mean like NeXT had in 1988 and Cocoa / GNUstep have now? Interfaces can be drawn by UI designers and just wired up to controller objects.
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That is hardly the "worst thing" about WebOS. The worst thing was it couldn't do simple things like join a Enterprise Wireless network like Android of iOS could, you know, by pointing to the WAP and filling in credentials and so on. Then it wouldn't authenticate against Exchange 2010 properly, like Android and iOS could with their Exchange Connectors.
I got my hands on one this week for the first time, after spending an hour fiddling around, scouring forums and beating my head on the wall ... I just gave up.
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Prototypes, typing, functional elements, and abusive pseudo-OO are not the problems with JavaScript. The problems with JavaScript are as follows:
1) No threading.
2) It sounds too much like "Java", which leads to much confusion of newbies.
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JavaScript doesn't suck because it's prototype-based. It sucks because it has horrible syntax (that is also too verbose; at least Perl is concise for all its flaws!) and screwed up semantics in several things that are done differently in all other languages (like scope of local variables). It has literally nothing better over Python or Ruby or pretty much any other "scripting" language other than PHP and VBScript. Most certainly, it's no good for serious FP - heck, it doesn't even guarantee tailcalls, and i
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Sorry, I have to disagree with you, at least in the present time.
I've been using some Web apps (javascript, html5, you name all techs involved), like floorplanner [floorplanner.com] and upverter [upverter.com], and I find them barely usable. My computer is not however a high-tech one (Core2 Duo T2300 @ 1.66 Laptop, with Nvidia GeForce Go 7300), but it's specs would be *more than enough* to run such simple applications.
Perhaps the problem is not JS itself, nor HTML5. Perhaps the problem is we're using a technology which was not meant, on the
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Have you tried multiple browsers? Not all browsers have the same performance with HTML5+ Javascript.
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Yes, I did try Firefox 7 and Chrome 14. Chrome is a bit faster than Firefox, but not fast enough.
It's a pity.
A few billion to acquire it, then open source it?! (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't make much business sense, but at least the community can actually benefit from HP's blunders this time.
Re:A few billion to acquire it, then open source i (Score:5, Insightful)
If webOS has all the right things to take off in a big way, a device maker like HP can really benefit. I don't think HP likes having to pay the microsoft tax on all their PC's (they'd sell a lot more cheap pc's if they could reduce the price by the cost of windows), so if the next generation of devices are built on open standards like javascript and html5 take off, all the better for HP.
Yes it would have been great for them if the world embraced webOS while it remaining fully owned by HP, but that just wasn't going to happen. The only possibility of getting people really interested -- given the head start both Android and iOS have -- was to set it free. It may turn out to be the smartest decision HP ever made.
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Yes, the massive head start that the open source android platform has will be entirely erased by open sourcing webos at this late date... Somehow...
Re:A few billion to acquire it, then open source i (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A few billion to acquire it, then open source i (Score:5, Interesting)
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What good is this? (Score:2)
Re:What good is this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you sure? Waiting for decision to be reversed (Score:2)
Nothing the management of HP has announced lately has actually stuck. It is bad enough that they are indecisive, but the fact that they can't stick to a decision means I'm not touching anything HP for a very long time. It would not surprise me if after open sourcing it and a lot of developers put a lot of time and effort into it, they attempted to close it back up.
best of both worlds? (Score:5, Insightful)
So HP has decided that they want to continue using and directing webOS, but they don't want to pay for its development.
Re:best of both worlds? (Score:4, Informative)
Two points:
1. They still employ the software side of the WebOS team. The only people who were laid off were the hardware guys.
2. They've already said they're looking at Windows 7 or Windows 8 for their next tablet.
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1. WebOS has a hardware component?
2. HP has also said that they were exiting the desktop market and looking to sell webOS.
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With respect to your #2, they have already officially backtracked on "exiting the desktop market".
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And for your #1, WebOS was tied to hardware, until TouchPads were discontinued. It was a combined hardware/software platform that they bought from Palm.
The point is, they aren't getting software development for free as suggested. Some help probably, but not free.
And as far as looking to sell WebOS, that obviously didn't work or they wouldn't be opening it.
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You make it sound dishonest, but they're not putting gun to contributors' heads and forcing them to work on webOS.
A decade ago there was a lot of skepticism about Linux and open source in general. How could something that depended on altruism be sustainable? The answer was that open source doesn't depend exclusively on altruism; enlightened self-interest plays a big role in free software's viability. You choose to participate or not based on the benefits and costs to *you*.
Had, for example, BeOS been open
Actually it probably will wither and die. (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless Google does something radically Ballmerian with Android, WebOS will bitrot. That's because there's no clear commitment from HP to have a continuous source of money, and there isn't any obvious evidence HP will be very ge
Post opensourcing, Mozilla was lousy for quite a while until Firefox. Firefox was pretty successful because there was a 1st version of a good product, skilled people motivated to work on it, and very importantly Google supplied them with quite a bit of stable money: payment flow from the Firefox home page. Then, Google had a strong interest in preventing IE from taking over, and funding Mozilla fairly generously was aligned with that goal. Now, Google has other imperatives and they have their own browser. As a consequence Firefox has less stable leadership and if they lose the revenue stream
By contrast, there is no particularly compelling reason for HP to fund WebOS development. What's in it for them? Does it help sell HP hardware? No. Does it help damage a competitor? No. Putting a few HP employees on it is not the same as giving lots of money to an independent foundation who can hire.
If HP needs those people to do something else, they will give up their WebOS, because people will follow the paycheck & whoever is doing their performance review.
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It may not be commercially successful but just like Android, it will probably be ported to all kinds of platforms by various geeks doing it for fun. More to the point, the good bits of WebOS will be snarfed up by those doing other open mobile operating systems like Android, the MeeGo ecosystem (with all its different bits and names and stuff) and the guys doing FreeSmartPhone.org
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Good points, but what do you have against finishing your
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On the surface, this seems like the way to go. HP/Intel/Samsung/Maemo all pushing a superior alternative that can run Android apps and that can get some marketshare.
They all have the same goals - can they get it together?
What to buy? (Score:2)
Alright, I'll bite. What is a good WebOS device for sale (I know, they're all discontinued) that we could buy and install the Opened OS on? The Veer appears to be the newest phone and the HP Touchpad the newest (only) tablet. I haven't previously paid much attention to their product line so I'm curious what hardware the WebOS enthusiasts prefer.
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The preferred phone is Pre 3. I have one and it's ... well ... nice. Really nice. Not the superphone of my dreams, but really nice, and it's open. The webOS is marvelous, but there are a lot of kinks and small unpolished bits that are kind of annoying in the long run. I'm hoping opensourcing the OS will help fix those. The hardware isn't as good as I've been used to with Nokia phones, but it's nice never the less. The best points are the hardware keyboard and excellent design. The round shapes make it a uni
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The catch is that nothing outside of existing Palm/HP devices fits the bill. One of the great t
Enyo:Nomad (Score:2)
Might one then say that Enyo is going Nomad?
Obvious question (Score:5, Interesting)
contributing webOS to the open source community
Under which license? GPL? BSD? Apache? Open source means a lot of different things.
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Yeah, if they want to avoid fragmentation, BSD seems the way to go. (CCL == BSD, I think?) 30 years later and we don't have distributions of BSD, we have 'branches'.
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Yeah, if they want to avoid fragmentation, BSD seems the way to go. (CCL == BSD, I think?) 30 years later and we don't have distributions of BSD, we have 'branches'.
Absolutely, and all 5 users of each branch love it. >;-
(come on, you know you wanted to say it )
Eheh (Score:2)
Going to get modded down for this but the reason there aren't dozen of distro's for BSD is because nobody uses it. If you REALLY want no fragmentation, go HURD. That is so unfragmented it got ONE install.
Enjoy.
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Still no word on the license as of Dec 12. Hopefully it's because they're talking about this pretty seriously and/or wanting the announcement to make a second big splash. More likely, they're just trying to secure the (legal) rights to various pieces of code they may have sub-licensed themselves (and/or the search for submarine patents or accidentally stolen code).
I'm hoping this is LGPL, like GTK+ and Qt (though hopefully at version 3). This ensures any OS-level change must be submitted upstream, but
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, but unfortunately I think they just want free labor.
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I'm sure Amazon and B&N will gladly hand over the keys to their bootloaders to allow HP's firmware to run on their branded devices. While we're at it, maybe Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony can all get together to allow any game to be played on any console.
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Please send me one of your flying pigs.
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maybe Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony can all get together
Please send me one of your flying pigs.
Yeah! I want a flying pig too. and can I get it in green, just like the one in angry birds? :p
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What's in it for HP?
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Sam Flynn did it (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the fire sale was a strategy? (Score:2)
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If they are smart they can make WebOS, the mobile phone platform that RMS can approve of. And then they'd have something of value.
Unfortunately, that does not count for much in the regular world... Even in the geek world, the amount of people that would switch from android to something else just based on license would be minimal. I am pretty opiniated on licensing issues, but moving from android (a hacked version) to webOS does not make much sense...
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A company that changes CEOs every 3 months cannot be said to have a "strategy".
So I was right ... (Score:2)
the kindest thing HP could do now is open source WebOS and hope the Chinese put it on cheap smart phones
HP making more hardware. (Score:5, Interesting)
Meg Whitman said in an interview with The Verge [theverge.com] that they are planning on making more tablets later. We'll see how that pans out, but it might give webOS a bit more traction.
Also the open sourcing webOS might open the door for the Dalvik VM and running Android applications on webOS. That would make things interesting.
iLO (Score:2)
It would be fantastic to see it embedded on iLO boards in HP servers. The ability to extend the iLO with user-supplied code would be terrific.
Gun to shoot yourself with... (Score:2)
The whole point of the server service processors is to always work no matter what. To maximize the chance of this happening, the hardware vendors want the software running on them to be as tested and deterministic as possible. If end-user code fork bombs or triggers OOM killer to effectively ruin the running state of the service processor, that is bad. Ideally, you'd think an end-user would realize the blame was all their own, but two things occur:
-'Why didn't you make your platform bullet-proof no matte
My theory... (Score:5, Funny)
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And now, the game changes (Score:2)
I had a palm pre (Score:4, Interesting)
and now I'm sporting a new android phone. Because I had no choice after HP killed webos and the hardware.
Open sourcing it is probably the best thing they could do, at this point.
If you think WebOS is dead, let me tell you, in many ways it was and is still miles ahead of android.
I severely miss the productivity of the seamless, quick flipping between running applications that even my much more modern android phone (with at least double the processor speed and memory and more than twice the screen size) cannot fathom. Yes android multitasks, but switching between apps is a pain, even with third party task switchers. And there's nothing as slick and reliable as synergy and the webos messaging UI.
Here's what I'd like to see: port the WebOS development "stack", the card GUI, and synergy (with the email, messaging, and facebook apps) to android. Find a way to get android apps to run within the webos card GUI. Thats an "app" I would happily pay good money for. I hate my android phone sometimes (in the same way I hated not having many apps on my palm pre). Lots of apps though.
I think this would be a better goal than just porting WebOS to various hardware. WebOS will probably never have the apps that android has. Eventually, I'm sure, Android will catch up in the GUI and such.
Enterprise tablet? (Score:2)
I never quite got why HP never pushed the Touchpad for enterprise use.
I can't think of another tablet that had Java SE available to install.
(Ignoring the Win7 versions running on x86, mostly reskinned keyboardless netbooks)
There are a ...few... companies that use Java for many internal apps, (or at least user facing portions) and given the tablets specs it seems a natural.
I'm still hoping to score one Monday assuming HP still does the Ebay dump, the (sold) prices for the 32gb seem to have been hovering arou
That's it, it's doomed (Score:2)
When a major corporation makes one of their previously proprietary crown jewels open source, it's an admission that it's dead.
(And for those who are going to say that WebOS was never close to being one of their crown jewels, what would you call an HP jewel? HP-UX? JetDirect?).
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Fsck! I haven't got the memo that Java and Solaris are dead. And here I am, busy implementing a major public platform and a service on a technology with no future.
It is actually a good move for HP if they are positioning webOS as an alternative to Android, which is open source and has the largest smartphone OS market share.
HP/UX (Score:2)
But GP does bring up a good point - if WebOS is worth Open Sourcing, why not HP/UX? After all, for all practical purposes, it's a single platform OS for Itanium, and all its competitors - FreeBSD and Debian - are FOSS. So why not make HP/UX FOSS as well?
Re:Does this mean.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Evan as a fanatical android fan, I can tell you that you're dead wrong. webOS has a tons of great ideas both in the interface and underlying app-system that would be very useful in a combined scenario. The ability to write apps in the webOS way, for an android device, would be fantastically awesome.
Re:Does this mean.... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure that it would matter quite as much at phone-screen sizes; but the comparison at 10 inches was pretty stark.
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You consider Java an actual programming language?
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You need to do a little research. Everything in the industry is pointing right at HTML5 as the future of application programming...especially with cross platform applications.
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Please explain the logic behind that statement.
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That said, I did love my IIIc back in the day.
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Didn't HP recently say they planned on using it in printers [slashdot.org]?
Maybe (though, admittedly, unlikely) HP is realizing they can use it for commercial products and have it open-sourced.
Of course, I seem to recall HP paying several billion dollars for Palm, so that's gotta leave a mark.
Re:OSS majority (Score:5, Funny)
Didn't HP recently say they planned on using it in printers [slashdot.org]?
No, that was last week.
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Didn't HP recently say they planned on using it in printers [slashdot.org]?
No, that was last week.
Yeah. Eons given the frequency of changes in HP's direction.
Re:Thanks but no thanks (Score:5, Informative)
webOS isn't HP's baby. They just adopted it when they bought Palm.
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People said this about nokia and blackberry before iphone came up, and they said the exact same thing before android came up. So the comments about too many strong players are clearly wrong, you just push a strong player out of the way when you come up. But you're also right. It'll never get that point. It's lacking two rather important things ... What WebOS needs is a strong partner that actually gives a shit and an actual device that ships with it. Last time I checked people rooting their phones to
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This is about the smartest thing HP has done in awhile. About time somebody understands the power of Opensource.
What makes you think they understand it?