Fair questions! Long before my time, but just before the shutdown, the community scraped the catalog metadata -- its been available in a well-known IPK since at least 2012. Because of how apps were built for webOS, and the amazing community around it, lots of sources are on GitHub or SourceForge. Many of the IPKs similarly came from community archives. Most of the media and SDK material came from the Wayback Machine, although some is still available on HP's servers. In the end, I drew from multiple sources, then had to write tools to compile it all together into a usable fashion.

I did reach out to some of the big name publishers, but was generally ignored. Because the content is for archival purposes, and there are some provisions for this in US copyright law, I decided to take the approach of removing content upon request, rather than trying to get affirmative responses from people who are either unreachable, or uninterested. To date, I've had one (very polite) take-down request, which I responded to immediately, and removed their content entirely from the archive. Today's post blew up a little more than I expected, so I may get more -- I'll respond to each appropriately.

Everything I've published is on GitHub or archive.org, and while I don't have as much spare time for it now, I'll do my best to keep it curated and within fair use. If you'd like to add some of your content to the archive (or have some of your content removed) I've posted my email a couple of times in this thread, or you can find it on the website.