“Last week, I promised you an outline of the webOS governance model. Today, we’re publishing that model and announcing the leaders of the Project Management Committees. As you will see below, we’ve based the model on the Apache Way.” Open governance, something Android decidedly lacks. Too bad nobody (with money and factories) seems to give a toss about webOS. The world’s an unfair place.
“Too bad nobody seems to give a toss about webOS.”
Or meego, tizen, kde plasma active or whatever else is floating around now.
There’s barely time to make an actual release before these things are dropped/sold/forked now.
Nobody wants to buy into something that will be shuttered the moment they leave the store.
Plasma Active was community driven from the start. It’s not going to be dropped. Others are orphans or the corporate power games. Mer is Meego’s successor and now is a community project. Open webOS will probably survive now too. Time will tell how Tizen will fare, since it’s not openly governed and is driven by corporations.
Edited 2012-02-16 05:36 UTC
Plasma active has probably the best shot out of the bunch for that reason. But that doesn’t mean the manufacturers that pick it up won’t ditch it at a moments notice.
They’re taking pre-orders for the Spark tablet now. If you really care about the future of open tablets and have ~$250, get one.
One doesn’t follow from the other. Community-driven things (also many ~mobile efforts of the last decade) can and are being dropped constantly, too.
(and for better or worse, when it comes to meaningful levels of long-term survival among ~mobile open source OS, we can be even fairly certain only of corporate-driven Android)
Then they shouldn’t buy a computer in the first place…
Consumers like to think that their tablets/smartphones are appliances comparable with their old wood framed CRT, who can last 40 years of daily usage fully functional.
Those old wood framed CRT hardly ever did that; just some rare bird, and how people remember such survivors better (a very common bias of memory http://www.osnews.com/thread?507479 – really, we merely think it’s any good; and such ~technical myths aren’t even the worst of it: for example, “old times were better” – while generally it tends to be the opposite – are also at the core of some more silly forms of ill-understood conservatism).
Just like it will happen with present consumer toys – I can pretty much assure you that, in half a century, some surviving tablets/smartphones will be similarly cherished, basking in the myth of “they don’t build them like they used to”.
Enyo will probably survive, because it’s potentially attractive for developing ordinary web applications. It’s basically just a class-based component object model for javascript, and it’s broadly useful outside the context of any particular OS.
Will we see WebOS devices shipping end of 2012?
Some Chinese companies maybe?
Did some digging and some think HP will release WebOS devices in 2013 again. Probably old news to some.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-27/hewlett-packard-plans-s…
Why wait till 2013? Is there predictions that hardware will be price then to profitably sell WebOS devices in 2013 at that magic $200 range where it selled like hotcakes.
Me thinks they are working towards shipping WebOS devices from that same assembly line they plan to use for Windows 8 Arm devices in 2013.
Well, certain parts are proprietary and are being replaced with open source parts. Other parts are pushed upstream and Enyo seems to have been partly rewriten or something.
Their plan is here:
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2012/120125a.html
Yes, now that you mention it that probably is the biggest most laborious factor. Getting the proprietory code out.
Seems like the WebOS project are doing it right.
It will be interesting to see if it flies, or if it drowns in the sea of others.
If WebOS wants to live, what the devs should do is make it run on older smartphones.
For example, how many iPhone 3G’s, Samsung Galaxy S and Motorola Droids are there floating around? Millions and millions. These phones have perfectly acceptable hardware but no or dieing support from the manufacturers for upgrades. Why not make WebOS the OS that users can install to give their phone a second life?
I would be perfectly happy to pay for the OS.
Cyanogen Mod does a decent job of that, minus the iPhone 3G’s.
In any case, web OS or any os for these phones will have the same problem getting drivers for the graphics chip/wifi/gps/camera.
Hardware manufacturers need to release open drivers.
Open drivers will help manufacturers develop updates to them faster, which will help them put newer versions of android on them, which will cause consumers to buy them.
At least in a perfect world that would be the way it works.
Open drivers would be most preferable, although a second best bet would be for WebOS/Meego/Android to settle on a single userland to driver interface…
That way a single kernel can be used on each device, to support any OS. This shouldn’t be too hard as all 3 are already based on Linux, only some of the drivers differ.
A stable driver ABI for linux, are you mad? That would be infinitely more difficult. But you’re also right, it would also solve the problem.
Too bad nobody (with money and factories) seems to give a toss about webOS. The world’s an unfair place.
Maybe some guys from XDA Developpers will pick it up and we will see webOS running on some new phones and tablets.
It’s too early to say webOS won’t have any traction or success.
The code is already coming out. Enyo was released last month, and Isis, their QtWebKit-based browser, was released this week.
http://enyojs.com
http://isis-project.org/