Open webOS Beta Officially Released
blog.openwebosproject.org
blog.openwebosproject.org
The same thing happened in the iPod/mp3 player market. Hard to compete when it takes tens or hundreds of millions of dollars up front just to secure parts to be on par with Apple, let alone trying to get ahead.
Most big company management just doesn't want to invest that kind of money to compete with an established winner like the iPad. Samsung is about the only company who can afford to do it and that's largely because Apple is in effect subsidizing Samsung's production costs by buying so many Samsung parts.
Is, say Google, allowed to use that without paying royalties? Or does HP still own those software patents?
"The Beta release is comprised of 54 webOS components available as opensource. This brings over 450,000 lines of code released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community."
And again, IANAL, but I assume the implication is that you can't just grab some code and stick it alongside your app for protection. You are only protected if you actually used the license-giving code in your app in the intended way. So this would not help Android, which does not build upon WebOS.
I don't know that we'll ever see card stacks and the like in Android, but many of the best UI changes in Android 4.0+ have been ideas that Duarte brought with him. The way Android handles notifications now would be a pretty good example.
I think ICS's Recent Apps view and Chrome's card-like tab switching show that Google is (cautiously?) approaching a card stack UI.
Can anyone elaborate on how this actually works? I would expect the UI rendering and Javascript execution to be all happening in one WebKit process. I would be excited to learn if the webOS team has come up with something I don't know about here.