Now that Hewlett-Packard appears to be a little tipsy, not really knowing where it is and what it’s doing, Reuters is reporting that the company is working on selling its webOS operating system. HP acquired webOS as part of its purchase of Palm, made a big fuss about the whole thing, and then let it fizzle out. The company rumoured buy webOS? Oracle.
Oracle? How does that work, you ask? Well, Oracle has close ties to Apple, since Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, was one of Steve Jobs’ closest friends. This explains – in large part – Oracle’s interest in suing Google over Android’s use of Java technologies. Since Oracle probably has some spare change lying around, a purchase of webOS and associated IP may give them some additional patents to sue others with.
On top of that, and this is the less cynical explanation, Mark Hurd, HP’s former CEO who got ousted a little over a year ago, now works at Oracle. Hurd led HP’s purchase of Palm, and he may still be interested in doing something with Palm’s technology. This would, however, require Oracle actually building something other than enterprise products – say, devices. Or, maybe, a licensing scheme.
Something I don’t find very likely, so I’m just going to stick with the former option.
The first version of Reuter’s article mentioned several other companies who were interested in buying webOS: other than Oracle, it listed Amazon, Research In Motion, IBM, and Intel. Amazon makes some sense, since the company might be using Android, but only the lower-level stuff. RIM doesn’t make sense, but then again, when is the last time RIM did something that made sense? IBM and Intel buy random stuff all the time, so that wouldn’t be surprising either.
I sincerely hope webOS isn’t going to end up at Oracle. Ever since its botched handling of the Sun acquisition, and its patent trolling over Android, I’ve grown to dislike Oracle quite deeply, and seeing something as fun and interesting as webOS end up in their hands makes me very sad.
Intel can probably think of merging webOS with Tizen/Meego. Not sure though how good that is.
Forget Intel. They’d dump WebOS on the first company coming their way just like with Moblin. And never hear about it for the next 5 years.
Software doesn’t fit in Intel’s corporate culture. In fact, they’re not very good at anything else than CPUs.
It’s a company that bought several video card companies (Chips and Technologies and a few others IIRC) and yet, in 2011, still can’t build decent low end GPUs. Intel poured billions into the Larrabee project and it was a complete disaster.
Hm, and it is a company which bought McAfee …which seems to fit fabulously with “Intel isn’t good at software” :p
Also, they bought and effectively killed Project Offset (check out videos from 5 years ago, still quite impressive)
At least Havok seems to still do OK. Likewise VxWorks (though, I hear they were always a bit of a “necessary evil”). And for some reason, their compiler seems quite decent… but such software gets into “they’re not very good at anything else than CPUs” area.
Though, honestly, Intel GPUs are perfectly into “decent low end” for a year or so.
Edited 2011-11-16 00:09 UTC
Jeez, HP is a company in trouble. They just bought webOS a year ago. What a bunch of idiots.
Of course Oracle will buy it. They buy anything and everything these days. But Larry must know what he’s doing. Oracle’s been on a roll for years with its acquisitions strategy.
And Oracle might make it available to the open-source community? That could be good.
Oracle making it available to the open source community?! LOL! The ONLY thing Oracle might do with it is sue (Android?) for supposed patent infringement.
Palm was a mature company with many legitimate patents. WebOS, buy itself, was an OS created by Palm and released in 2009. I doubt highly that Oracle would want anything to do with one and not the other.
I dislike Oracle since forever. What was there to like in the first place?
Asshole CEO? Crappy support? Superexpensive shit?
Oracle WebOS
This sounds like a joke xD
I mean, there is nothing what oracle can do with webOS beside taking the Patents.
I mean, they will never create an Tablet with it or invest something in this segment – Entertainment and so on.
And open sourcing it? No way.
Then Intel is a much better candidate for this.
Except WebOS runs on ARM.
They might be interested in the portable part, which should not really be platform dependent.
Well, technically, WebOS runs on Linux (kernel)….
In theory, one could port WebOS to any platform that Linux has already been ported to.
Of course. One more gun to shot Android and who knows what else.
This is the way how the big corporations deal with innovation, in the present days. An arsenal of weapons to protect their dated tech offerings.
If Oracle buy it they’ll be able to sue others but others wont be able to sue them until they actually produce devices.
Amazon, Google and others should rally to stop this.
[quote] Well, Oracle has close ties to Apple, since Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, was one of Steve Jobs’ closest friends. This explains – in large part – Oracle’s interest in suing Google over Android’s use of Java technologies.[/quote]
Riiiight.
It couldn’t possibly be because Oracle stands to make a pile of money if they win the case. And it of course could have nothing to do with Sun highlighting the opportunity to sue Google & Android when selling their company.
No, of course that’s too outrageous. The most obvious answer is “it’s a conspiracy.”
Sun was not a sue-happy company. It wasn’t in their DNA.
The attacks on Android came all at once: Microsoft, Oracle, and Apple. Three companies with extremely close, long-lasting ties to one another. This is not conspiracy-thinking – it’s common sense. Everybody with more than two braincells to rub together has already figured this one out.
What’s more likely – three large companies with strong ties to one another attacking Android all at once *by accident*, or *by plan*?
What one assumes to be likely doesn’t automatically turn in to solid proof.
Companies sue each other al the time. Google tried to rip Oracle off with Java, Oracle was bound to sue them. A number of Android device makers ripped off Apple with their iOS imitations, Apple was also bound to sue. And why would Microsoft pass up any easy money if companies use stuff they own the patents to?
Google & friends created a situation that almost forced companies to take legal action. Companies don’t start suing to do another company a favor, unless there is something in it for them and so they might as well sue without any deal.
Can I have what you are smoking?
For instance:
Over at Groklaw they have posted a transcript of testimony by Google’s Inside Counsel (corporate lawyer), Bob Van Nest, about the negotiations between Sun and Google.
Dr. Cockburn, who is mentioned in the transcript, is Oracle’s damages expert whose assessment was thrown out by the judge for being “based on nothing”.
MR. VAN NEST: The negotiation that took place was not a pure licensing negotiation. And that’s been confirmed by all the participants, including Mr. Schwartz, the CEO of Sun at
(10)
the time.
Google had two essential options in building Android: They could have entered into a technology partnership with another company and contributed resources and engineers and built Android together, that’s what they were discussing, in fact, with Sun.
They discussed that same thing, Your Honor, with several other companies that already had virtual machines. So they went to several companies, not just Sun, and said, do you want to build this project with us together? We’ll provide engineers and technology, you provide engineers and technology, and we’ll build the product together and the advantage of that was, it might be a little faster.
The other option they had was to build it on their own, build it independently and using their own engineers, own technology and/or licensing technology from other third parties, not –not just Sun, because many other folks were building virtual machines.
What happened was, they couldn’t come to terms with Sun –by the way, in those negotiations, there wasn’t any specific discussion of the patents. Nobody showed them Sun patents. Nobody said, are you infringing these patents. They didn’t see these Sun patents until Oracle showed them to them a month before –
THE COURT: Why did they need their license, then?
(11)
MR. VAN NEST: They were negotiating a technology partnership, they were negotiating an agreement. They weren’t coming to say, we need a license to your technology, they were coming to say, we have a product and a project we would like to build, we would like to build it together, you guys have technology that might be useful, we have technology that might be useful, let’s partner together and build it.
And that is what was being proposed in 2005 and 2006 in these discussions we’ve been talking about. That was not acceptable, ultimately, either to Google or to Sun, they couldn’t reach term on that. So Google went out, they built their own. They used a clean-room environment. They didn’t look at any of these Sun patents we’re talking about.
And the kicker is, Your Honor, discussions continued, there were further discussions; Sun became more and more and more interested in getting on the Android bandwagon.
So when Android was announced in 2007, Sun didn’t throw up their hands and say, oh, my gosh, you’re infringing, Sun congratulated Google on Android, welcomed Android to the Java community, put Android on Sun products, asked Google how they could help Android.”
Now just because he is testifying under oath doesn’t mean that you have to believe him. But if others who participated, such as Mr. Schwartz, testify to the same thing then will you think they are doing it to sabotage Oracle’s entitled income stream?
And just below that part is more testimony about how Java was always licensed for de minimis (mis-spelled in the transcript) rates. Does that automatically translate into $billions in compensation? I won’t say you be the judge. There is one in place already. (o;)
I’d say if Google needs to license Java they need to pay a fair price. Considering the huge amount of Android devices out there that should be rewarding enough for Oracle.
However I don’t see any mention of a deal with Apple or Microsoft to join in the fun to attack Google. They may very well have such a deal, which I don’t believe, but Thom does. Neither of us have any proof. Companies have been sued for less.
License Java? It’s open source. The only thing needing licensing is JVM, and Google created Dalvik. I don’t think creating your own version of something is stealing/unfair/whatever.
I wish this would get decided or settled soon. Kinda tired of this uncertainty and “facts” being thrown around.
Edited 2011-11-13 10:26 UTC
Innovation relies on standing on the shoulders of giants. If each of the giants charges a fee, innovation goes nowhere. Imagine what wouldn’t have happened if Vint Cerf had been so short-sighted as to patent the WWW.
Google didn’t rip off Sun/Oracle. They innovated in the space because it was clear Sun wasn’t going to do anything to meet their needs. Android might look something like iOS now, but it’s all based on metaphors that started with the earliest PDAs.
I don’t mind innovation and I don’t like all this license/IP/patent stuff. But considering we do have those it is no surprise companies sue each other and as Google & friends are “BIG” they become a target. And companies shoot at them, that doesn’t mean/prove there is an axis of evil formed to attack Google.
The Android idea is innovative, but the execution is not. It’s mostly not innovation, but copying. Before Samsung copied Apple’s stuff they copied stuff from others.
Other companies do this too and it’s not difficult to understand way, the enormous success and public image of Apple. Even little things like sticking an S behind your latest product is probably inspired by the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S. It’s all about saying “well, it’s not an iPhone, but it’s roughly the same and cheaper so buy me instead”.
If Vint Cerf had patented the world wide web I’d have to say that would be amazingly far sighted of him, given that the world wide web wasn’t invented until Tim Berners-Lee developed it in 1990.
WWW = internet (Cerf) + httpd (Berners-Lee)
If either had patented their contribution the web would have not taken off … people would have stayed on AOL for their e-mail.
Oracle was already the company to hate way before purchasing Sun. Especially if you’ve ever had the misfortune of using Oracle (db) and/or dealing with their support.
No, Oracle didn’t botch the purchase of Sun. They are doing just fine with Solaris and Sparc stuff. What they did do was shaft the open source community Sun had built up.
I think that’s exactly correct. I think Thom’s article has a dig at the “botched” acquisition, but has no information to back it up.
Oracle is obviously far less pro-open source than Sun was, but then, Oracle is hugely profitable, Sun was not.
Open Source is fine if you can make it work, but the way Sun was doing it just did not make any sense.
I think its all a matter of perception point.
Sun was spreading itself very thin in the end. When Oracle bought them they said no to a lot of stuff, most notably their open source efforts, which obviously pissed off people. The resulting hardware business is much more focused than Sun was near the end, which is the right thing to do if you want to make money.
Oracle is worse than M$, Apple and SCO combined! You all saw what they did with OpenOffice! If some company needs to bleed, it’s Oracle! >:|
What exactly Oracle did with OpenOffice?
They try to make money with it, not to close it or something like that. When they understand that unfortunately this is not profitable they give it away to Apache. The best option could be Open Document Foundation but still OpenOffice is open source maintained by company supported open source software.
If MS couldn’t make profit from Visio they probably will kill it.
I agree with the comments here about Oracle being anti open source. They are a very successful money-making corporation, and open source gives them relatively meager revenue opportunity, so of course they tend to work against it where possible.
I don’t agree with the negative comments about Oracle service and support. I’ve worked with the “big three” databases (Oracle, SQL Server, and IBM DB2) for many years, and Oracle service and support is very competitive.
I don’t see Oracle thinning out their hardware focus by adding consumer hardware to the mix, especially since the guts of WebOS don’t include Java anymore.
This would more likely be a patent play, to add some leverage to their case against Google.
I like webOS. It’s nice. It sucks sometimes, but what doesn’t? Personally, I just want to be able to continue developing for webOS without it being a wasted effort.
Cheers,
Aaron
It is all about the code isn’t it.
Just a thought, but why stop at webOS…
HP/Compaq/DEC has been basically able to kill off the MIPS/PA-RISC/Alpha/Itanium server market, so what is left for the enterprise server market from HP? HP has already been talking about spinning off the PC business, why not the enterprise business as well? They can make alot more money in the printer/toner/ink business with just a fraction of the overhead of all the enterprise overings which are dying as we speak anyway.
That falls right in line with Oracle’s vision of enterprise dominance. Now it’s basically a two man race of IBM and Oracle for the datacenter (in the UNIX market that is). Oracle could offer SPARC/Fujitsu servers on the highend and HP/Intel in the low-midrange. Consolidate the UNIX market around Solaris and it would be hard for IBM to fight back (considering IBM Global Services is one of the largest resellers of Solaris anyway).
Then move onto the webOS potential….Larry E may have been a friend of Steve J, but is still a very shrewd businessman. With Steve J gone what’s stopping Oracle to encroach on that market too? It’s very doubtfull, but always possible. I don’t think Larry’s corporate stategy has much regard for the deceased (cold but true), only cold hard cash. If there is any inkling that a profit can be made, Larry is definitely all over that potential. Not sure why Oracle would want to get into consumer grade computing, but I’ve seen stranger things occur. Maybe the past HP CEO/new Oracle CEO Mark Hurd is a clue, could he create that kind of transformation to the Oracle product line and customer service?
Or maybe it’s as others have speculated and the webOS portion is for the patent treasure chest? Who knows, but it’s fun to speculate!
….and then I woke up in a cold sweat….
I am tired of these depressing acquisitions of open source projects that are never fully pursued. I wish some unexpected company with a stronger device development tradition would move in here, see the full potential of WebOS and turn everything on its head.
ASUS perhaps?
WebOS is not open source, mate.
ASUS? Maybe not the best candidate.
Who was the inventor of the Linux Netbook? Who killed that invention on the drop of a hat when “biggy buddy” MS called?
Who knows of an ODM that is in search of an OS and isn’t dependent on MS’s ad rebates?
Hmm… I am not so sure about that. I think they show time and time again that they are willing to experiment with crazy shit like Splashtop and the funny Xandros distro they put on their netbooks. Kudos for actually bringing those produces to the market before MS craps all over them!
I think ASUS is in a different position now, having released several fairly nice and successful Android tablets. I wonder at what point the phone/tablet division will be more worth to ASUS than their MS laptop division.
Hey, let me speculate will ya! 😉
I’d like to see the acquisition made by Dell or Yahoo, or someone else that has a lot of money + has past open source contributions.
Imagine if a company like Mozilla owned it.
I think Oracle may be buying WebOS not because of its patents, but rather because it can then state that Android is actually competing Oracle’s products with WebOS being a clear competitor to Android. They can already make use of this in ongoing trial.
So nobody else sees the beauty of a phone running webOS on a Solaris kernel using ZFS for storage on top of a SPARC processor which you could tell to email a dirty picture of yourself to
“SELECT *
FROM contacts
WHERE gender = ‘F’
AND age BETWEEN 18 AND 25
AND weight < 65”??? 😉
Maybe for “enterprise” tablets or something but I really don’t see Oracle as a good candidate. I could see another premium consumer technology player buy it up at a premium. One of the major camera manufacturers for instance (Nikon, Canon).