HP will bite the bullet and dump the WebOS operating system on the open source community. The company made the announcement, as expected, that it would no longer sell the software and instead will transfer the source code, along with the ENYO application framework for WebOS and the remaining components of the user space, to …

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Sunday 11th December 2011 21:42 GMT Anonymous Coward

MS win here, potentially

One less competitor for Win8 tablets

No more dual boot PCs that would be popular with consumer and enterprise buyers

Real question is when HP say they will support it, what do they actually mean? I don't think the IBM-Linux model will apply here.

I wouldn't want to be on HP's webOS dev team at this precise moment. Good luck to everyone there.

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Monday 12th December 2011 01:34 GMT Milo Tsukroff

History Repeats Itself - HP Stuffs Good Product Down The Loo - Can U Say IPaq?

History repeats itself. HP bought Compaq and then dithered with its iPaq line until they crap-engineered it into oblivion. I have some 2nd-hand iPaqs people gave me. I am frustrated they never fixed the simple problems like memory corrupting when loading a document more than about a half-Meg in size. Complaints were met with, "Is it under warranty? No? Well come back to us when it is." Applications fought each other. Hardware broke way too easily - the most easily broken was the recharge bracket! The poor-step-child attitude of product support destroyed the iPaq line.

Then the iPhone came out. It basically had just the same capabilities as the iPaq. But it was fully functioning and well-supported. And the rest is history.

So the history of the Palm purchase has gone down the same route. But HP is learning. It took them less than 2 years to bring WebOS down, a lot lot less time than it took to destroy the iPaq.

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1. Monday 12th December 2011 10:45 GMT phil 27
  
  Familiar
  
  What your missing, is there was a linux port to ipaq called familiar linux, and while that may have been niche and long dead, a lot of good ideas and projects kicking round the embedded world grew out of that or were uplifted by its needs. Gpe and opie wm for one.. Im sure that expertise and lessons learned went onto webos in the early days.
  
  Most of the work on famiiar was by a few guys at HP's Labs, who were gifted time to the project by HP themselves, and there was a build cluster also supplied gratis by HP. I remember the huge amount of work contributed by Jamie of HP Labs who drove the pace of progress like mad.
  
  Oh and a guy from europe caused loads of hassle on the mailing lists and eventually everyone fell out just when it was bearing fruit, and someone threw their toys out and sat on the domain etc, it was almost like certain individuals were against the whole thing because someone could see potential in what was being done right back there. What was his name now... Florian something or other. Might have been Florian Mueller...
  
  I hope webOs goes on, giving us all more choice in the tablet market. Android is a secret walled monitored garden, IOS is a public monitored walled garden, and real linux on tablets is still very niche and in its infancy (kudos to Archos for their gpl compliance though!)
  
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  1. Tuesday 13th December 2011 00:51 GMT Grease Monkey
    
    I agree totally. I was still using memory map on an iPaq until very recently when the GPS jacket failed. The iPaq still works and I'll keep it in case I see another GPS jacket cheap.
    
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  2. Thursday 15th December 2011 11:55 GMT Grease Monkey
    
    "What your missing, is there was a linux port to ipaq "
    
    Forgot to mention that what everybody seems to be missing is that an awful lot of iPaqs were made by HTC. Remember the hw6500? People raved about that little beasty, but it was really an HTC. HP fumbled badly with the ipaq line, HTC of course went on to bigger and better things from basically the same devices.
    
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Monday 12th December 2011 21:22 GMT genericallyloud

webOS vs B2G

Obviously webOS is much more mature, but anyone willing to devote serious time into keeping webOS alive would probably prefer participating in Boot2Gecko. I mean, that's about as open source / open web as you're going to get if that's your reason for liking webOS.

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