HP Launches The Beta Release Of Open WebOS

It will be worth trying for sure. But the "Open Source Linux-Based Mobile Operating System" market is getting awfully crowed. We have WebOS and Tizen. MeeGo lives on as Mer. Mozilla is pushing Boot2Gecko which sounds to me a lot like ChromeOS. All of these are using variant combinations of the same underlying technologies and making many of the same architectural choices. Most or all of them, let's be honest, are going to die slowly.

And then we have Android, which maybe scores poorly as an open source "project" (and even worse as part of a "Linux" community) but nonetheless remains very open. And it's well supported by a large community in projects like Cyanogenmod. And it's very well polished, and it's feature-comparable with pretty much everything in the market. And it's successful, with a larger installed base than any other consumer OS in history and an application ecosystem larger than any mobile platform made by a company without a fruit in its name.

I'm not going to tell people what to use or work on. But isn't it time we in the free software world at least nodded to which direction the wind is blowing? In this case specifically, wouldn't it make more sense to try to evolve Android in WebOS's direction?

There are things I really like about WebOS. One of my favorite features is cards and card stacking. It's so awesome to press the home button, then swipe left or right back to the last app you were in, showing a card that looks like the state of the app as it's running right now.

I know you can do app switching in Android 4.x (I have it on my Touchpad), but the items are small and in a vertical list, and shows all last opened apps, not just 'running' apps.

Still, due to the absolute lack of anything resembling a decent WebOS app, I run Android 4.0 on my Touchpad.