HP dropping webOS devices [LWN.net]

HP dropping webOS devices

Posted Aug 19, 2011 16:07 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455)
Parent article: HP dropping webOS devices

Not sure anyone should mourn the passing of another proprietary OS. Why HP doesn't simply slap android on their hardware boggles my mind. I would run out today and purchase a touchpad if they did. The kernel supports their (very good, despite the comments here) hardware, so throwing android on top would be a cinch.

Heck, why anyone would not make their hardware run android even if it came with another OS boggles my mind? As a customer, I appreciate having hardware with OS choices...

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HP dropping webOS devices

Posted Aug 19, 2011 17:04 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Not sure anyone should mourn the passing of another proprietary OS.

Nobody says they're dropping WebOS, the software, yet. They said they would stop making WebOS devices.

On the other hand, whether HP will manage to get somebody else interested in making devices to run WebOS, to a point where it makes sense to put resources into developing the software further, is anyone's guess so we shouldn't be surprised to see them shut down WebOS altogether at some point down the road.

HP dropping webOS devices

Posted Aug 20, 2011 21:03 UTC (Sat) by ksmathers (guest, #2353) [Link]

WebOS isn't (wasn't?) really proprietary. It is a stack built on Linux, Webkit and V8. Even the core services access layer is just an adaptation of Node.js. The services were mostly open source as well, using e.g. libpurple (aka Pidgin) to provide XMPP support. Native PDK development was using libSDL or an embedded GL library depending on the application, with standard C libraries.

The only proprietary part was pretty much the look and feel, and the application manager as far as I could tell from my reading.