HP Kicks webOS To The Kerb
mondaynote.com
mondaynote.com
WebKit in particular is a derivative of KHTML and KJS, KDE's HTML and JavaScript engines. Given their LGPL licensing, Apple had no choice but to make WebKit open source as well. Now, The article doesn't preclude this, but since the above follows a rant about "corpospeak" and is thus chiefly concerned with the behavior of corporate/commercial entities around open source releases, it seems prudent to point out that the WebKit codebase wasn't originally the product of such an entity -- and the same of course applies to Linux, too, making both rather poor examples for the author's purpose.
Cringe-cringe at the iTunes analogy, too, with the "more or less legally" not applying to what's in RHEL. This is also indicative of sub-par writing: A simple explanation using clear language ("customers pay for services, not the code") is eschewed in favor of trying to make a comparison that doesn't really fit, but has brand recognition.
Summarizing Firefox in terms of Mozilla Corp.'s financial situation is also doing poorly by it. Mozilla's possible financial dependence on Google is an interesting topic in and of itself, but anyone who's measuring Firefox by its success as a "3. Profit!" scheme doesn't understand its history or its makers - nor its true success/impact in web history.
Gassée can range from entertaining to insightful, but this one's just too lazily executed and seemingly unaware of a lot of context. Well, it was a Sunday I suppose.
It's difficult to tell which side WebOS falls on, as parts of it were open source all along, and Palm/HP has always embraced the hacker community since the Pre came along (allowing booting from USB, custom kernels, Preware, root access without jumping through hoops, etc). This could be a natural progression, or it could be a last-hurrah. It will be decided in the marketplace, not in the media, and it won't take long to find out. The next 6 months will define WebOS' future, if other companies jump on board or not. A system doesn't often get three chances at success, and WebOS has used up two of them already.
I may not have gotten this across properly, but the same is true of WebKit or rather its KHTML/KJS progenitors (KDE is an open source community and its trademark-holding legal entity is a not-for-profit).
I'm pretty sure that was exactly Gassée's point, though it may not have been clear enough. Linux and Webkit (and Apache, etc, etc) are very successful FOSS projects, but they grew organically out of open source and weren't closed software that was thrown over the wall of a company later in life like WebOS will be.
One could point to projects that were handled somewhat like this and were still successful (like Mozilla), but IMO there's still a valid point that situations like the WebOS release result in stalled projects more often than they result in a successful long term FOSS project.
Unless there is very clear and committed leadership (which would probably have to come out of whatever is left of the existing WebOS team to have any sort of authority), the project will be doomed.
> But the successful Open Source offerings were created in Open Source form. They weren’t “contributed” in a last-ditch effort to save face after unsuccessful attempts to monetize a proprietary version.
No, that isn't true at all. Many very successful open source projects were "contributed" after commercial development, for example OpenOffice and Netscape/Mozilla. And we might as well list Android there too, it's developed behind closed doors and contributed periodically as open source - and it seems to be doing quite well.
It's true that sometimes projects are "contributed" in the sense of donating them and forgetting about them. But that doesn't mean all contributions of previously closed-source code are unsuccessful.
Furthermore, the author seems to only value huge amounts of revenue as a marker of success. The only FOSS project they consider to be "a success" is apparently Red Hat with $10B market cap. It's a success, to be sure, but to say all other open source projects are not (including ones with hundreds of millions of users!) is just funny.
Given the situation HP is in, open sourcing WebOS makes the most sense. There is no other good option. Some good analysis, which is spot on as opposed to the article here, can be found at
Firefox still has >25% browser share[1]. That gives them de-facto control of the searches from a large number of of them (excluding the people who change their default search engine).
If Mozilla can't get >$100 million a year form Google with 25% of the world's deployed browsers then I'm going to start a search engine and pull an Lycos[2].
[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/
[2] I think it was Lycos. One of the early search engines bid money they didn't have to get a placement on the Netscape search engine, and then went and got funding based on the placement.
If the deal with Google dies for Mozilla, I will reduce my use of Google's search services and use other search engines whenever possible.
I strongly believe people who say they use Chrome "because it's better than Firefox" have no clue what they're talking about. They usually have no idea and don't care about not being tracked, nor about not having their browser secured with addons such as adblock plus, noscript and others.
And who knows? Maybe webOS will catch on. I know it made some design decisions that were superior to Android, in many ways. It was designed from the ground up for touch interfaces, whereas Android was designed initially for a keyboard + trackball interface. I think webOS will at least make Android stronger, even if it doesn't survive on its own.
http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/28/hp-windows-8-tablets-arriving-...
Perhaps he is bitter about how things turned out with Palm and HP?
Wrong. Firefox is downloaded by millions of users - there's value in being the default search engine. If Google didn't offer fair market value, Microsoft or Yahoo would.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_%28software%29
Don't forget QT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28framework%29
There are enough counter examples to call BS on the whole diatribe.
It's funny how articles like these appear like mushrooms after the rain whenever one of the following things happens:
- an open source project which can "lower" the sales of Microsoft's products is launched
- a new commercial product is launched and it might lower Microsoft's sales
- an application / product gains enough traction to threaten Microsoft's position in some market
- Microsoft's products become less relevant to the needs of the people & the companies
- people talk about issues with Microsoft's products - try to saturate all the websites and news feeds with counter-offensive articles against the competition
- IE / Bing / etc lose market & people migrate to other browsers and search engines
I've seen this happen with Android, Linux, open source database software, Open Office, web servers and others.
Also symbian was pretty much a phone-only OS, and I'd imagine was pretty tied down to feature phones. webOS will most likely be ported to netbooks pretty early on when it's released (the development emulator runs an x86 version), thus making a low-power consumption cloud-based netbook environment.
As you've said, it was only for phones, it was a pretty bad inflexible platform and improving it was very difficult.
However, Android and WebOS can help each other and improvements which end up going into the Linux kernel (as that's the "real OS") can be of use to ALL Linux devices.
After all, WebOS has a thinner stack above the Linux kernel. From what I've seen so far, it does a pretty good job at connecting the web to the Linux kernel and wrapping it nicely for the end user.
This means people will be able to customize it to their needs and provide patches upstream. From what I have seen so far, WebOS is a lot easier to work with when it comes to making something cool for it. I've even thought of using it for some of my own projects and I am now confident that it will be the right stack to use for those projects.
This is what will allow a far more rapid expansion than any other OS on mobile devices and touch based appliances - flexibility.
That guy who wrote the article didn't have the slightest idea about what he was talking or what he wanted to say.
I worry this'll happen to WebOS, each tablet maker will release their take on it, app stores will be different etc and it'll be relegated to that Tablet OS only nerds use.
I do hope it does see some increase in deployment, having used a WebOS device it really is quite nice.
Oh, by the way, "most smartphones" includes the ones running WebOS.
That Linux isn't widely used in desktop PC operating systems is a point of ever-shrinking interest and of little economic relevance.
My point isn't about the the underlying OS (the kernel) itself, which has gained huge traction. It's about an experience to the end-user and the developers that's consistent. Not having to pick a .deb, .rpm, to know what libraries are/aren't available etc.
That's my fear for WebOS - that many different versions will get built. Some will support WebGL, some HTML5 etc. (These are examples, please don't tell me the do/don't exist already - I wouldn't know). The whole fragmentation thing people talk about with Android, but to a much greater and detrimental degree.
The real problem, for the "common user", is that you cannot waltz into your neighborhood Best Buy and get a Linux laptop. To run Linux, you have to realize that the operating system is not part of the computer, care enough to install another one and spend a bit of effort getting it to work with whatever computer you have. If half the $500 laptops at Staples, for example, came with Linux, it would be much more popular.
There are, I think, two core reasons people cannot easily buy a laptop with Linux: Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft for its anti-competitive behavior and virtual monopoly; both companies for unrelenting marketing that presents only two options--the patently false Mac vs PC dichotomy being a perfect example.
I know from experience that completely technologically inexperienced people are perfectly happy with Linux as long as they're not the ones installing it. The fact that they could possibly be running KDE instead of Unity does not worry them in the slightest; in fact, particularly with Ubuntu, very little does worry them. My roommate, for example, has had fewer problems with Ubuntu than with Windows, and they were easier to handle.
In short, Linux adoption is not limited by any inherent qualities. In fact, if we just look at the sort of people who would install any OS at all, it controls a large part of the market; however, this is just an unfair a comparison as looking at the market in general.
But the GUI aspect, the bit the user actually interacts with, isn't. There's so many choices. A vendor can't just built a single binary easily like they can for Windows/MacOS.
It's this, the fragmentation of the user-space that's my concern. WebOS is built on Linux anyway, that'll never be a problem.
You can "can simply get Ubuntu and not worry about it". I know that, you know that, most technical people know that. I guess it's not too hard for most non-technical people to figure that out, but look at Linux Mint. It's suddenly taking off in a big way. How do I know which one to pick? Which one is going to run the apps I need etc? It's that - the confusion - that I worry might also happen to WebOS if 10 different builds are released.
Just so you don't think about it again: it's mostly Microsoft blackmailing people into not selling ANYTHING but Windows on the hardware.
If you think that's not true, you should really think of the time when ASUS was selling netbooks with Linux. I recall reading a lot of stories about vendors being blackmailed by Microsoft - stop selling hardware with Linux or you will not receive any more rights to sell your hardware with Windows.
If WebOS will be 100% open, HP won't be giving unfair advantage to some vendors like Google does with Android, then all will be much better.
Yes, there's fragmentation in the Linux world, but it's not like you can't get started as a novice. I've helped people who switched to Linux and said "fuck windows". They were persons who don't have any kind of formal IT training.
This really looks like one huge rant along the same lines as the article itself.
Wikipedia says it is based on the Linux Kernel, so is it like Android which sits on top of a small Linux kernel, but has its own API for UI and telephony?
My understanding is that to achieve fluid, high FPS UI we need to HW accelerate, which means getting specs from HW manufacturers, which traditionally has been a problem for Linux hobbyists. The people who have access to these are the manufacturers. In this sense, WebOS would have difficulty achieving any kind of traction.
It's the OS Palm developed for its tactile smartphone "Pre" line (which sadly failed in the market).
> Wikipedia says it is based on the Linux Kernel, so is it like Android which sits on top of a small Linux kernel, but has its own API for UI and telephony?
Yes.
> My understanding is that to achieve fluid, high FPS UI we need to HW accelerate, which means getting specs from HW manufacturers, which traditionally has been a problem for Linux hobbyists. The people who have access to these are the manufacturers.
That's an issue when trying to get open-source drivers, but these don't have such restrictions (all Android phones have "the right" GPU drivers, Android is just awful at using them). Phone manufacturers have all the specs they need when the build phones, and can use binary blobs provided by chip manufacturers if need be.
> In this sense, WebOS would have difficulty achieving any kind of traction.
This issue really has very little relevance.
The absence of GPU drivers mean WebOS has little relevance for tinkerers.
5. Enyo (webOS 3) and Mojo (webOS 2) JavaScript application frameworks
4. SDL native development kit
3. Luna RPC messaging system
2. OpenEmbedded userspace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEmbedded
1. Linux kernelAm I the only one who thinks this?