HP's decision means webOS could end up more open than Android | Hacker News Reader

HP's decision means webOS could end up more open than Android

arstechnica.com

57 pointsevo_919 comments

Or it could end up dead. No products = no development. No development = dead.

WebOS will have exactly the same fate as so many great OS that had zero commercial backing, let alone products. Let alone that it'll fall massively behind the current market leaders and never be able to catch up again..

I bet Samsung, HTC, Sony, etc. all want to reduce their reliance on Android now that Google will soon own Motorola.

I'd rather see them a more open alternative like WebOS than WP7, which hasn't been successful for them so far anyway. I love Android, but a strong WebOS alternative would be great.

Samsung already has bada, with 4.5 million installs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bada

Open dead is better than closed dead. I've got an Aureal 3D sound card which works perfectly with its Windows 95 drivers. The company died, took its software with it, and that card is landfill material rather than happily providing beeps, bloops, and buzzes in a Linux box.

It's interesting because the commercial support of WebOS has built a pretty solid SmartPhone and tablet OS which puts it on somewhat equal ground as iOS or Android for now. I can't think of any other parallel where a somewhat competitive platform is open sourced and hits the ground running.

The lack of hardware is an issue in the short-term but we'll probably see WebOS ports for a lot of popular Android devices to start with. From there the not-Samsung, non-Motorola, Android device makers might want to give it a closer look.

Emphasis on could. What we have now is necessary but not sufficient for that to happen.

It's going to be really interesting to see how it plays out. Even assuming it does get adoption, the most likely path is device makers and carriers taking the open source version and customizing the crap out of it and releasing their own "closed" versions of it, just like Android. And if HP does anything to prevent that then what we inevitably have is something less open than Android.

I do very much like the fact that Google now has another player that will keep them honest about how "open" they are.

A copyleft license [1] could probably eliminate most invasive proprietary "value-add". Though that might hinder adoption, being just a dump pipe or a box mover isn't very profitable. Hopefully companies are getting desperate enough to give up on Apple-like profits.

1. A license that requires derivative works to be distributed under the same terms

WebOS UI could easily run atop an Android kernel. Programming in some nice web-based toolkit instead of java-like stuff would be a godsend (PS: I always hated java to the bones).

No, it couldn't.

If by "Android kernel" you mean the full richness of the existing APIs, the UI framework, UI conventions etc., then no, you can't just mash up two full-featured OS who both need exclusive access to hardware, have their own UI conventions, APIs, different ways of doing the same things (like showing notifications, switching between applications) etc.

If by "Android kernel" you mean "slightly modified Linux kernel that Android uses" then technically yes but it's a meaningless statement. WebOS already uses (possibly slightly modified) Linux kernel, the kernel changes constitute about 0.1% of their code and they are not what defines Android or WebOS.

The inverse is more useful.

webOS running with an interface to the Android market and ability to run Android apps. It should not be that hard to get that working if people pitch in to help.

- Dalvik needs to work under webOS which should be a recompile and some changes. There's also Alien.

- Android apps need to have a generic wrapper to put them into webOS cards.

- Some other interface issues to clean up.

So, who wants to help do this?

PS: FWIW, webOS essentially uses an Android kernel already.

Genuinely curious. Why would you want to program in Javascript on a resource constrained device? Seems like shooting yourself in the foot before you start to me.

Essentially because it's easy and pleasant (as opposed to java). Modern javascript VMs are very efficient, too. Then current phones aren't that constrained and are used a lot for web browsing anyway. And WebOS devices already proved that JS is suitable tool for the job.

Exciting. In some ways webOS seems more modern and advanced than iOS and Android because it's using web / cloud paradigms at it's absolute core.

Even though I run iOS, the fact that you can build entire apps in Javascript is cool. Hopefully I can get my hands on a touchpad to try it out

Interestingly enough isn't that how iOS started out? At least to some extend. It would be interesting to know how mobile/web would look today if Apple didn't introduce native apps and instead fully committed to web apps.

I remember reading that Steve Jobs originally wanted the iPhone only to run web apps. That's why the "Add site to homescreen"-option has always been in the browser.

Then jailbreakers came along, and demanded to be able to run native code, and boom, Apple agrees and we have the App Store.

It's interesting how opinions can change, and choices strike back.

The big difference is that all the apps on the original iPhone were native apps, so the iPhone javascript interfaces were missing a lot of features. All the apps on the original WebOS phones were actually web apps, so their javascript interfaces didn't suck.

Enyo is absolutely amazing as a javascript dev framework. Very easy to use and understand, even for someone just starting out with JS and mobile development. In some ways, this was the thing I wanted to be open source more so than webOS itself.

At this stage the kind of openess I strive for is that developers have an option to distribute software to customers without asking a third party for permission. The kind of openess we know from OS X and Windows XP.

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